


Folie à Deux

by Penrose_Quinn



Category: Joker (2019)
Genre: Blood and Violence, Crime, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Drug Withdrawal, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Hallucinations, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Masturbation, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Murder, Non-Consensual Touching, Obsession, Older Man/Younger Woman, Period Typical Attitudes, Psychological Thriller, Semi-Explicit sexual content, Substance Abuse, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2020-12-21 03:02:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21067721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penrose_Quinn/pseuds/Penrose_Quinn
Summary: In this shared madness, it takes two to dance.





	1. coup d'œil

**Author's Note:**

> [1] This is slightly revised. I've considered making this into a two, or if it gets longer, possibly three-part series. Sorry for the drastic change. But hey, at least, it has some form of direction now.
> 
> [2] Starts at the midpoint of the movie and eventually tackles on post-Joker events.
> 
> [3] A fair warning; (attempting) to stay true to the spirit of the film, this will delve into dark and disturbing matter and will be ambiguous in some aspects. Some things might not make any sense at first. Hallucinations play a big role in everything. Reader suffers quite a lot from it, like poor Arthur.
> 
> [4] QRT is the Quick Response Team. Gotham's version of SWAT. GCPD is Gotham City Police Department and GCR is Gotham City Radio.

_ **1** _

_ **.** _

_“It’s as if I’ve been sleepwalking my whole life . . .”_

Your eyes flutter open, and at the back of your head, you can see the flickering of a gaslight somewhere, indecisive whether to blaze on or to fizzle out and drop dead. _On and off_, it blinks at you. _On, off, on, off_. You reflect about it for awhile until you realize that you're not half-asleep in a cab anymore, crammed in the traffic during the rush hour, choking under the dense smog of a warm muggy late-August night.

You’re losing track of time again. Somehow, you can’t remember the uneventful drive that has hauled you all the way to a desolate parking lot near the subway station. From the corner of your eye, you stare at a dying thread of smoke to your side, bidding a shallow goodbye after a snide _gotcha_. You twist on the half-stick cigarette tangled on your fingers.

The smoke's getting into your head, it seems. It spins when it does. Makes slow unamusing twirls. But you're in the most sedated you've ever been and it's all you can ask for in a grinding day like this.

Oh. You don’t see the busted gaslight anymore.

You chuckle a little. Everything's all tight-locked and smoking inside the compartment of your silver Corolla. If your supervisor, Detective Burke, ever finds out about your bad habits again, he'll be already knocking on the window, berating you for recklessly dozing inside a closed car. _Jesus, Starling, you suicidal?_

"Funny," you mumble under your breath, rolling your eyes at the faux-memory. You're never really a heavy sleeper on the job, though these days, you have to admit that it's a little hard to relax and sink in for a few fugitive minutes of shut-eye. That's Gotham for you. Crime rates are skyrocketing like crazy and nothing's ever going to get any better. Then there’s all these ashes dusting on your papers. “Goddamn.”

_Positives,_ you remind yourself, brushing the ashes off the sightings of the clown murderer—or vigilante, as the rioting crowd like to call him; next is a full-page report of an alleged rapist and tailing along the back is an armed smuggler, photos, dog ears, and all. _Yeah, think of the positives._ Like a pack of premium smokes. AC. New shoes or whatever. And, and . . .

_Oh, honey, ever considered moving in to Metropolis?_

Clicking your tongue, you dial on the radio only to reach for the knob and settle for the oldies station in a quick second. _Fucking super rats._ Headlines are sharply swamped down by the uncalled-for soulful voice of James Brown, swimming through slow blue notes and the smooth swing of string and piano in _It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World_.

You idly hum along the tune. Punching in the automated cigarette lighter, you roll down the window for a good two inches and rummage for a packet of American Spirits overlapped by folders and your new detective badge on the seat beside you. _Shit, it’s empty._ You sigh, attempting to ignite the only cigarette you have left with the car lighter that fails and eventually drags you out of your car, hunting for the nearest convenience store.

The air feels thick and greasy all over you. The kind that seeps into your pores and pollutes you inside and out. You don't fuss over it anymore, not like how you used to. There's always the ice-cold soak of a shower, but deep down, you know you're already polluted. No one ever lives in Gotham without getting tainted in its filth.

Walking along, you can’t help but feel that you can just drive to the store. No one really gives a damn where they are parked nowadays, but you do. You have to, in some clean orderly way as possible. You like to think that you're doing this piece of shit city a small favor. _God knows it needs all the favors it can get._

There’s a brattle of bells inside _Vera’s Store_ and the creak of a door welcomes you more warmly than the old store clerk, stone-serious and tediously listening on the radio newscast about the latest super rats’ breakout. You scoff. You order for two packets. “Benson and Hedger Golds,” you say and the clerk just nods it off. It’s pricey, you know. The original plan is to get a packet of Camels. Maybe even a Virginia Slim or a Kool, just for the menthol.

But today’s been a lot. Feels _a lot_. Benson and Hedger is a nice balm for a bad day. You’re just treating yourself.

You almost snort out a laugh at that. Treating yourself might be an understatement. You've been taking in smokes for a couple of weeks and more than you can count. Well, you've stopped counting at some point. Stopped caring in the teetering boundary between a harmless smoke break and a dive into addiction.

At the back of your mind, you can hear Burke call you out for it and maybe even go for the pep talk that you’re young and you should know better. _High marks. Top of your class in Gotham Police Academy. You’re going to places, Starling, I’m telling you. Just not . . . you know, not in this dump_, he has once told you, and you recollect about the past conversation, missing the chance to retort back once you’ve gotten all cold.

The next thing you know happens in a flash when you pay and step back with your cigarettes. That’s until a blip passes by your train of thought, brushing shoulders, a meek mutter of apology, and something brilliant red and shiny._ Malboro Reds,_ you guess at first. Though it’s a little stronger than that, burns longer, smoother. _Ah, Winston._

And then just when you’re about to leave, it rains.

“_Great._ Christ,” you take shelter under the awning of the store. Outside is a little better. _Vera’s_ is a stuffy place to be in anyway and you’re keener in avoiding the radio if it’s still blasting out that bullshit with the rats when the sanitation strikes, the consistent house blackouts, and the clown riots are turning into a major issue.

You concentrate on the white noise, the speeding taillights of cars, the pedestrians, the piling trash bags at the side of the curb. Breath in a little deeper and the city’s sewer exhausts are going to catch up to your nostrils. No rain can spare anyone from it.

Shuffling for a lighter in your handbag, you hear the groan of the store’s door close next to you. _You’re kidding. _No light, no smoke, no goddamn peace of mind. It’s almost as if you’re seeing that blinking gaslight again in the distance. _On, off, on, off._

Regardless, you tear out the cigarette packet and pull one stick out. “Hey, you,” you recognize him as the guy right behind you earlier. The one with the carton of milk and a Winston Classic. “Got a light?”

He blinks at you, at first. Like he can’t believe that you’re actually talking to him. For a second there, you’re almost tempted to snap him off his trance just before it breaks and he nods shyly. His hands roam over the pockets of his sand-colored jacket before settling on his pants, and to your relief, he manages to fish out a red lighter.

You take a step closer, muttering a terse thanks. Then flick, fire, _inhale_; rich tobacco fills in your lungs and you sigh at the taste of it. From the pouring smoke out of your lips and the flame of a lighter, you catch a glimpse of the stranger.

Tall, distracted, withdrawn; you've seen men like him before, lurking around the deep-ends of Gotham's bustling cesspool, slogging on about their lives in rotation as nameless faces and begrudging the thought for letting it step over them for the rest of their lives.

He's a little odd, though. Perhaps forgetful, perhaps thoughtless, perhaps not giving a shit anymore. There's a gash of dried-out paint from his jaw and he's picking on it like a scratch to a foul itch. Head's always bobbing down, eyes to his worn loafers, fingers fumbling on the unraveling strap of his bag, or the cuff of his sleeve, or the side of his elbow. It's hard to not notice. He's so skittish. Impatient and weathered down by the rain, just as you are.

Now, you're starting to mull over whether you're curious that you're somewhat sensing a nervous habit here or it's just the cheap paint blotted on his face.

“Hey—”_ shit, easy on the tone. _It takes another resigned drag of tobacco from you to properly sift out the words: “uh, sorry, want some?” you cringe at the forced drone of your voice, but you’re already offering the packet up to him and you’re just wondering if he’ll ever take one.

It's not like you haven't offered cigarettes before, but it isn't the same if you've started to give one to a stranger. It's easier to ignore and wait it all out till the rain stops, though you're in the mood to be generous, and—_fuck it, what the hell?_ It's not like he's out here to be a full-time snob just like you.

“Oh, o-okay,” he accepts one, mumbling out a quiet thanks and lighting it between his lips. It’s the timidness, you observe, that one can mistake for hesitance or uncertainty, despite how a little too willing he is to not refuse.

You wrap your second-hand tweed coat closer to you. “This sucks.”

Puffing out a cloud of smoke, he clears his throat. “Hm . . . uh, what was that?”

“The rain’s a downer. The weather forecast got it wrong again.”

“Oh,” he says, scratching the back of his head. “Um, want to hear a joke?”

Not giving it much thought, you shrug. “Sure.”

This time, he seems eager, like a child finally acknowledged by his peers. It lightens up his eyes—and for an interval, you do notice them about him. Bright, intense, vividly green. Phosphoric. Then and there, you realize that it’s a bit difficult not to look away.

He starts with a wisp of a laugh, smoke climbing up his grinning mouth. “What,” then something strains, throat bobbing, “_ha_, what would the weather forecast say if a, _aha ha_, killer’s on the loose? ‘T-there’ll be a _rain_ of terror on the streets.’”

You settle for a smile, a chuckle working its way out of your throat. “Rain of terror, huh,” you muse aloud, knowing fully well that you’ve never been clever in cracking up jokes or having a decent sense of humor. “That’s a good one.”

With a small push of confidence, he comes at you with all that child-like enthusiasm. “I have a lot more in my, ah . . . I-I do stand-up comedy. I—” and then he whips out his hand, sucking a breath, fingers shaky, lips firmly pressed together, “I’m Arthur. Arthur Fleck.”

After introducing your name, you don’t comment that you’ve caught on the slight croak in his words, though you don’t mind teasing him for it. “It’s nice to meet you, Arthur, Arthur Fleck,” you shake his hand, rough and bony. There’s a smear of paint at the crook of his nail and a bruise on the side of his wrist.

Arthur is a little caught off guard by the tease, but once it registers, he curls up his mouth into an awkward smile and huffs out a short laugh. His hand gives yours a light congenial squeeze. “You, too.”

After withdrawing back your hand, you recall behind a pleasant veil of nicotine around you. “You do stand-up comedy, huh.”

“Y-yeah, _yeah_, it’s in this great place, Pogo’s. It’s a comedy bar from here,” he says, folding his arms over his chest. “You should come by sometime.”

_Pogo’s. _You aren’t sure about that. “I’ll try, Arthur,” you say, opting for a vague effort than a hopeful affirmative because there’s something about the way he looks at you and you can’t find it in yourself to crush his spirit down through a flat-out rejection. You’ve always been careful in these kinds of exchanges with a sense of delicacy.

Then he tries your name, mouthing it gently, testing it at the curve of his mouth. It’s such a simple name, and sometimes, it doesn’t stick at all with others. Perhaps, that’s why you don’t mind being called by another one—_the farther from yourself, the better_, you always like to think—though his lips flit up by the sound of it after breathing in his cigarette. “So where do you work?”

“The GCPD. I’m a detective,” _not much, not there yet. _You clear your throat abruptly, thinking what’s come over you to bring that up when you can simply fabricate a convincing lie.

_Because no one ever respects that. Because no one believes it just because you’re—_

“A detective,” he repeats, curiously tilting his head.

“Well, I’m just a trainee, actually,” you reason out, shrugging. “But I get to do some sleuthing around.”

“Oh,” Arthur mutters. “It’s just that you don’t . . .”

You suck a cold breath through your teeth.

You interrupt. “Look the part?”

“I’m sorry.”

It sounds too genuine.

“It’s all right. I get that a lot,” you smile a little, retreating back to your cigarette. You’ve always braced yourself for an unconvinced glare or a word of incredulity, but never really the buffer of a soft sincere apology. You smoke in deeper, longer, until your tongue’s gotten stale and all that’s left is the gradual sting down your throat.

“You know,” you tell him, deciding to change the subject. “You should be careful at this hour. It’s been buzzing around lately that there’s a killer clown in the city.”

A second of silence.

“Oh . . . I’ve heard about that in the news,” he admits, but then there’s this unspoken concentration in his gaze, a fine thread of curiosity and anxious reluctance, hanging about him when he opens his mouth and finally asks, “what do you think about it?”

You hum musingly. “Everything’s gone hectic. Crazier,” you ruminate over the crimes, the subway killings, the prevalent corruption, the pollution stinking the air, the blatant jaded apathy in every living thing, in every living person that’s wept and kissed and cursed this city to the ground. _It never gets better, doesn’t it?_ You resign to a pensive sigh. “Hm, but to be honest, it’s not like it hasn’t always been like that here.”

“Yeah, it is,” Arthur agrees slowly, surely, in a contemplative spell, wherein for a moment, he’s somewhere else, somewhere distant and far and bleak. Cigarette forgotten, mind occupied, he whispers, as if it’s only for himself: “. . . it _is_.”

A chill creep up your spine as a passing wet breeze whistles at you. You gawk up. The nights in Gotham remain starless, leaving them with faded artificial ones. “Hm, looks like I can walk this one out,” You observe the rain slow down to a light drizzle, cocking your head out from the awning. “It was nice talking to you, Arthur.”

Seemingly snapping from another mild trance, he blinks at you and waves off the haze in his eyes. “O-okay, you too. And thanks again for the,” he gestures at the cigarette pinched between his fingers.

You smile. “Sure,” and then you begin to walk away.

Midway from your distance to the store and the pedestrian lane, you notice that there’s a washed-out color on the broken pavement, coming from the traffic light; a pale foggy green, its lightbulb glowing dim like it’s busting out. It’s blinking, fading, _on, off, on, off_. _Look at me. _Like an eye trailing after your every step, your every waking breath. Maybe, it’s intuition or some kind of paranoia for the unknown, but you go against your better judgement and dare to peer behind your shoulder.

And he _is_ staring. There’s a brief upturn of lips from him, and you decidedly acknowledge him with a nod and not look back, still ill-at-ease at the lingering gaze burning holes at your back. Maybe, it’s unintentional _but . . ._

You can’t get the image out of your head. His green phosphoric eyes and all.

Your apartment is a small cramped place, fit snugly for one; modest and bare and lacking personality whatsoever, when there’s little to nothing here that belongs to you but the boxes haphazardly misplaced next to the television and the stale-smelling furniture that still appears stiff and untouched from underuse. It’s the same dismal routine for you after moving in for the last five months. _Better than staying with Mama_.

You shrug off your coat, alongside those snapshots of the life you’ve left behind.

_All this, really? Just to prove some childish point? You’re such a— _

“Sure, Ma,” you huff out a chuckle, lighting a random cigarette clenched between your teeth.

Alone. You’re alone again. There’s no point making a few calls with some old friends because you’ve never had any strong meaningful ones. You hate the thought of reaching out in muffled desperation only to find that the people you’ve known have moved on with their lives without you and have made better life choices than you ever can. Better than renting a shitty shut-in apartment in Gotham.

You try not to think about it. There’s no point dwelling too much in self-pity.

You breathe in, consoling yourself over menthol-laced smoke.

Keys, clocks, locks, laundry, shower, and sleep—if you can.

These past few days, you’ve been sleeping more on the front seat of your car than in your own bed.

Whenever you do, whenever you try to slip into those cold covers, cocooned under the false comfort of the mattress, it’s the only time you are honest with yourself, staring at the wall for hours, tiring yourself to sleep, because you are restless and juddering all over and drenched in cold sweat in the dead of the night, palms clammy and shirt sticky and soaked as a used dishrag.

You reach for your meds from the bed. One, two. You reconsider for a third pill, but give up at the last minute once you feel a lead-heavy languor oozing in your bloodstream, morphing itself into an anchor that steadies you down and sinks you deep into your dreams. Though the clinch of some foul fear lingers like long scraggly fingers on your throat. You struggle for a little while. After all, it’ll only take a minute until that final _snap_ and then lights-out.

Lightning flashes from your barren window, and for a moment, you are afraid that the green gaslight blinks at you, watches you, sees you.

_“Something . . . strong. I need something strong just for—"_

“Here.”

“. . . what,” you mutter under your breath. There’s a coffee cup placed next to you, and by the stale smell, you can tell a lot, despite your daze; unwholesomely cheap, black, bitter, but it’s steaming hot. You welcome it down your throat until the caffeine is in your system and your mouth is finally stringing in the words, “oh thanks.”

“Thought you could need one,” says your supervisor, helping himself with a large gulp from his own. “Starling.”

_Starling._ Burke has only ever started to call you that because of a slight mix-up with your papers before you have had a proper introduction with him personally. Regardless, the nickname sticks and he has only called you Starling ever since, despite the slight breach in formality.

With a light stretch, you’re about to bring up your research about the subway killings case to him until something unanticipated grabs hold of you. You try to push it down. Go for futile attempts to tamp it all down with caffeine, get yourself together, but you’re falling piece by piece, like old chipping paint on a dry wall. Barely making it all stick to paint this stable portrait of fortitude.

_Not now, not now._

You feel your pulse rising at first, beating heavily on your chest like your heart is threatening to climb out of your mouth. You’ve known the feeling for years and only got yourself into coping with it a couple months back; an assault to the senses, a rattle to the mind when it leaves you with stiff joints and that painful strain from your throat, squeezing tight, making it difficult to swallow down breaths. It’s enough to make you writhe for air when you’re not drowning in water.

_Just like Dr. Martin’s breathing lessons_, you recall. Breathe in, out. In, out. Your left hand is shaking. _In, out, in, out. _Attempting to appear composed, you rise from your seat, stuffing your meds in your pocket.

He asks, again. “Starling?”

“Restroom. It’ll be quick.”

You don’t wait for him to nod at you when you’re already determined to walk away from your desk, making a beeline to the restroom. Distractions help and they take in the shape of the apathetic sight of fluorescent lights, spiderweb cracks on the floor, messy tables, the still overwhelming coldness from the air-conditioning, and even the clamber of typewriters noisily echoing about. Gordon’s still in the same spot, busying himself over file charges in his late-night shift.

_In, out. Calm down._

You also try not to overthink about other matters like your trembling fingers, the sweat gathering on your palms, the nausea settling in like a storm, the feeling that your head’s bleeding over, reeling, ripping apart, and those leering eyes from some of the officers lurking about their stations, smirking to themselves, stealing glances at you across the room. You should be used to this by now. You have to be to keep your position.

But even as you are alone, the mirror privy to your cracks, you still remember their wretched eyes all over you.

Sucking in another breath, you uncap your meds from an acrylic tub and slip one in your mouth through a dry swallow. Benzos. You take them for your nerves. Makes you less tense, less high-strung. Not as neurotic as you have been without them before. Drifting back to some past argument, you recall that your mother has never believed in modern medicine, railing on about how chemicals are bad for your body and that you lack faith. _You lack fucking faith._

For awhile, the shaking slows, stops. Finally, _finally_. In, out. Breathe.

The door squeaks open.

Quiet footfalls. A hum from some stray lilting tune. From the broad mirror, you see a squat figure looming from the far corners of the room and what steps into the pale flickering light is a familiar face of a man. You stiffen.

“Lieutenant Strauss,” you utter out, voice not without an edge of warning. “You’re in the _women’s_ restroom.”

Strauss doesn’t close in on you to prove a point. It’s the mental games that he likes the most. The intimate dread of helplessness that he can evoke to others. He’s not an arm’s breadth near you, but you despise how you can almost feel him breathe down your neck. Grope you up with his dead beady eyes.

Crossing his arms over his chest, he leans on the wall. “I’m not blind.”

_I hope you damn are._

Still, He’s one of _the_ GCPD’s respected Lieutenants. The title alone makes him untouchable. You can only wonder how many women in the police force has this bastard harassed in so many different occasions. The thought makes you sick to the stomach.

“Please, leave.”

“Why?” A taunt.

You wish you have your gun. You _wish_ you can threaten him with it.

Withholding yourself, you curl your hand into a fist, knuckles white, nails biting at your palm. “You’re making me uncomfortable.”

The swing of a door breaks apart the gravity in the room. Strauss slinks back into hiding when a clerk obliviously enters in one of the cubicles.

Steeling your nerves, you march out of the restroom, and while you’re bracing yourself over an attempt in blocking your way to the door, he does nothing but _stare_. Eyes like a broken gaslight. Blinking on and off. Then he places a finger to his mouth.

Your jaw clenches. You _hate_ him.

Dismissing what has transpired earlier, you return back to your desk and continue on as if nothing happened. As if nothing will ever happen. You doubt and doubt, as you always have and the days count on, uncaringly.

Thankfully, Burke spares you from your grudge-filled thoughts gnawing at you inside. “So how’s the search coming?”

“Well, honestly, I’m not sure whether there’s a connection between the suspect and Wayne’s brokers, specifically. But I figured that the suspect might be a working-class man, enough to hold off three men, must be in a low paying job regarding the statement,” you recall the multiple lesions to the last broker; one on the leg, two to the back, a final shot to the head. Aggression. Signs of ill-rooted anger.

Folding his arms, he intervenes. “Our killer clown’s a good aim. He killed the first two in a single shot. Think he’s trained?”

You shrug. “Maybe. Not sure about him being a gunman, though. A lucky shot, perhaps. Anyway, I looked into some small-time businesses and agencies that catered in party clowns around Gotham Square to the south. There’s a total of twenty-seven. Here’s a list,” you fumble for papers, tugging one out under your folder and handing it over to him. “Four have already gone out of business. I’ve contacted at least six that are still running, the ones in the red line. Nothing coming up yet. But there’s still seventeen left so. . .”

“I’ll take it from here,” he says, scanning the paper with another once-over. “Rest this one out. You look terrible, Starling.”

You snort. “That bad? I can still make a few calls, you know.”

Burke is a little stubborn, though. “You can do that tomorrow. You’ve been working hard. I mean it, Starling. Get some proper sleep. I keep catching you dozing occasionally while on the job for taking a couple of overtimes. You’re as bad as the Lieutenant.” You flinch at the mention of Strauss. _We’re nothing alike._

However, difficult as it is to admit, you don’t want to seclude yourself back in your apartment. In that cold empty place. Work is the only remedy that is keeping you grounded and plugged in this brooding world around you. It’s a little better than being cut-off to the rest of it. “Fine. Tomorrow then,” but you abide anyway, with little to no resistance. He is never really easy to convince and you aren’t one to stick around and protest about a minuscule thing for so long after all.

_I don’t want to go home._

The routine drags on, slowly. You clean your desk, swallow another pill, grab your tweed coat, and leave.

There’s another clown riot protesting in Wayne City Hall. All but with their fists and signs and masks. _Riots are the language of the unheard_, you’ve read once before from some past footnote. The underpaid and the overworked, the abused and the downtrodden, the penny-pinchers and the laborers, screaming together at the top of their lungs, sprawled on the road, causing the traffic jam.

The QRT is armored and equipped with firearm. _Put down them down. Arrest those who fight back. Do whatever means necessary to complete the task._

An officer starts the rampage when he beats his baton against an unarmed man. The crowd responds in an uproar. Tear gas. Guns. Fire. Violence. Hostile screeching. Passing vehicles blasting their horns like a battle cry. There’s a limp body being stepped over by a thousand. A woman made blind from the fray. A college student being charged for assault. Everyone bleeds and no one wins. There’s a dark smoldering rash on Thomas Wayne’s nonchalant face from one of his thirty-foot campaign tarpaulins.

A small group of officers gang up on a bat-wielding construction worker, indulgently taking their time mauling his curled-up body. His ears are bleeding. His ribs must be broken and his ankle sprained. Face swollen and unrecognizable, he can’t walk properly when he’s being hauled up to be arrested to the station.

The last vestige that you see of that man is a clown mask streaked with a red bloody smile.

“It’s chaos out there,” comments Burke. You agree, wordlessly.

You take the pill. Keys, clocks, locks, laundry, and shower. You don’t sleep. You refuse to dream.

The newsprint’s portrait of the killer clown is taped on your wall.

It’s funny, almost. You have a companion in your empty-shell of an apartment for once.

Charges of theft and embezzlement. Trespassing. Drug smuggling. The list piles on and on. Gotham’s the heaping sump of crime.

One of the female clerks that you regularly see in the office has filed for sexual assault. The next day, she’s cleaned out her desk and disappeared for good. There’s only so few strong-willed bright-eyed women in the GCPD and hardly remain the same person after a week or so.

You still lucidly remember the green and purple bruises peering from her collar. 

“Here.”

“. . . what,” you mutter under your breath. There’s a glass placed next to you, and by the scent, you can tell a lot, despite your daze; something bitter and acrid, something that’s going to scald your throat and stay down the bottom of your gut. Heavy and lethargic from a headache, you try to coherently string out your words, “uh, thanks?”

“Thought you said you needed something strong. Been giving you the strongest we got,” says a man—the bartender, you think, as he resumes back to listening in on the orchestrated drone of a laughing crowd. It doesn’t sound real and you wonder if it is in this near pitch-black darkness of the room. “That’s your second, by the way.”

“Second? W-what is it,” you might as well be getting swindled for buying expensive liquor, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the numbness you want, the temporal escape in a glass, glittering in an almost-luminescent maniacal green. Green like the broken gaslight and the eyes. _On, off, on, off._

You don’t bother reading the bartender’s nametag. His face is a blur in the dim light. “Pogo’s finest. A one of a kind Bribón Verde.”

_Pogo’s. _That sounds familiar, somehow. “Doesn’t seem like some kind of strong whiskey.”

For a moment, you overestimate your tolerance in handling hard alcohol and the end result of attempting to swig down a glass is a world of turning tables and winking red-amber lights and the start of a vicious head-spin. There’s an unsolicited irony in your drunkenness when the laughter swells and the artificial crowd breaks into a jeering applause for your slip-up in sobriety.

“That’s ‘cause it’s not. That’s absinthe. The real good shit. Packs a mean punch,” he explains before asking in wry boredom, “you still awake?”

“_Trying_,” you grouch out. “I’ll have some water.”

“We only got tap.”

“Doesn’t matter,” you say, searching for your purse. “Do you accept cards?”

After handing you a glass of water, the bartender reaches for your card and fixes it in a flatbed terminal. The sharp sound of the swipe abruptly punches at your ears like a distant echo of a gunshot. For now, you’re awake. For now, your left hand is trembling, nails blood-red from old peeling polish.

With a shaky breath, you tuck it under the bar stand and rummage for your meds. _Empty. Shit . . . dammit. _The acrylic tub mocks you in your desperation. Drinking your water, you decidedly settle for cigarettes instead. “Hey, got a smoking area in here?”

“Nope,” he says, returning back your card with the charge slip. “Just outside.”

Without a second thought, you walk out. You’re staggering mess from the dark pathway, stumbling on chairs and slinking against the walls, until a voice calls out your name from the exit. You’re more surprised that someone actually knows you in this place.

It takes an abrupt turn and a slow minute of recognition from you to draw out a name for the man standing next you. It doesn’t register to you, really, not at first, but there is something about his gaunt face that you do remember; the lines that crease over his mouth—from smiling or frowning? You can’t determine between the two. Those green eyes. Phosphoric, even in this low hazy light.

You blink. “. . . Arthur?”

Arthur smiles. What a telling thing, when he does. _You remembered._

When it hits you, it all comes back to you with those antsy mannerisms of his, the slouch of his shoulders, the fretful movements of his arms, itching and tugging over his unironed sleeves, and even that soft tone of his voice, muted and murmuring. “I was looking for you in your table. The one at the right, I think,” he recalls, scratching the back of his head. “You disappeared when I got there.”

You deeply muse over the assumption because you don’t remember sitting in one of the tables earlier. It’s a bar stand, you recall. However, you put into question a lot of things when your recollection fails you over what it actually looks like, how many liquor bottles can you count on display, what does it smell like, who is talking to you . . .

At a loss of words, you process it over again, though nothing ever comes up clear and what’s left for you are vapid half-guesses of this and that, and the afterthought that you have no inkling of a memory of what’s come before you’ve drowned in a dizzying trip from absinthe. You don’t even know how you’ve stumbled here in the first place.

“I didn’t really think you’d come and watch,” he says, smiling appreciatively.

_Me, either._

“You did well,” you enthuse, telling him this as if you mean it, because you’re trying to make the pieces fit in those hollow gaps in your mind, and you ride along the idea that you’ve been watching him perform on that stage and have briefly passed out from a drink at some point. Even though, you still don’t remember his jokes, you still don’t remember being in that table, you still don’t remember laughing aloud.

Arthur offers you a wrinkled packet of Winstons, a stick poking out the end. You stare at it for a second too long, and he jumps to the conclusion that you’ve turned him down, doubting himself. “Oh, well, it’s just that,” he starts, as he lets his hand awkwardly roam over his limp curls, “I thought you’re going to smoke.”

“Oh, I actually want one,” you say.

Once you’ve pulled a stick out, he seizes the chance to redeem himself by lighting your cigarette first before his own. Winston has always been a bit too strong for you. The taste smolders on your tongue, thick and overwhelming, and you’ve realized that you never have asked him why he’s taken a liking to it. How it must’ve eaten him inside, scraping him thin and wan beneath all that layered clothing.

You breathe in and let the smoke consume you, whittling the creeping anxiety in singes. You know cigarettes can never cure the malady, but it sure as hell helps calm you down, even a little. You sigh.

_How familiar. _The streets are bleak and drenched from the aftermath of a passing rain, and from the pavement under you, you realize that the storm drain is bad and leaking over a thin dirty puddle that submerges a portion of the road, but you attempt to see the good in it when all that murk and rat piss in the water is overshadowed by the lamp lights reflecting on the surface, casting this illusion of cold dust-gold suns gleaming within the smog.

“Hey, Arthur,” you say, loosing yourself over nicotine. “Can you tell me a joke?”

His eyes brighten at that. Nodding, he eagerly takes out a notebook from his paper bag, skimming through the pages, reading aloud, “Ha, why do serial killers make for good comedians?” he pauses for a second and you wait for the punchline. “Because, _aha ha_, they always get their victims _wheezing._”

The delivery could have been smoother and the joke couldn’t have been about murderers, though you’re never one to call yourself any better and something about that dark humor doesn’t fail to scrunch up a smile on your face. You don’t repress a small laugh. You remember him the first time, the cigarettes, the rain.

Small talk becomes a casual affair. You learn that he’s living with his mother, that he’s the only one providing for them, and that he always keeps his joke diary around whenever he feels the need to jot down his thoughts. A little embarrassed, he doesn’t show you what’s written inside. You respect that choice, even though you’ve caught glimpses of entry scrawls and questionable picture snippets pasted on the pages.

Arthur eases into admitting something in the middle of the conversation. _I’ve been practicing,_ he says. _Somehow, this is how I pictured it,_ he says. It eventually leads you into asking him why he has to read the murderer joke awhile ago if he’s already prepared for it. Chuckling, he curls up a lopsided smile. “I want to get it right.”

“Why?”

“I want to make you laugh.”

_Why? _Then you ask, and you ask, and you ask. It’s a repetition. An on-going circle of blatant diversion from not gearing the subject towards you. You don’t want his curiosity poring over you. The only time he manages to pick out an offhanded answer from you is when he mentions, “are you okay?”

You aren’t. You feel your head tearing in on itself, begging to swallow down the hazy lull of Xanax down your throat. “Too much to drink. Too much to think about, I guess,” you say, taking in a long drag of your cigarette. Light. Gaslight. There’s one in the distance, blinking furiously at you. Flickering on and off. “I-I can't really be seen like this,” you blurt out, hating the slight stutter in your words.

Arthur gives you a concerned look. “Like what?”

“Like a mess,” and now, you’re not making sense. Everything’s not making sense. Though some whit of control is still holding you from toppling over and retching out all your bitter, bitter regrets on the pavement, and you belatedly realize that he’s wrapping his ink-stained hand on your wrist. Maybe, he’s trying to be comforting. You ponder at that. “I—forget it. I’m just tired. It’s late. Maybe, we should call this a night?”

“Are you sure?” he kindly asks, and you feel the fleeting stroke of his thumb slip away from the inside of your wrist once his grasp loosens and finally lets you go. “You can stay at my place, if you’re still not feeling well.”

“Hm. You mean it?”

“Absolutely.”

“You're too trusting, you know that? I'm just a stranger,” you chide, tapping the ash forming on your cigarette with a finger. “You don't know if I'm some crook that’s going to break into your home and steal your things.”

He winces from your sharp tone. “You're not. I know you're not. You said you're from the GCPD, right? I can trust you.”

“That's—”

_Honey, do you have to be one of those silly detectives? You’re better than that._

Then you remember that dream that you’ve clung onto since your days in the academy and the small things breaking up that dream like tiny irreparable fissures that take the form of sneering officers, corrupt cops who’re paid by the mob, and the rampant police violence that gets tossed around. The domineering face of the Lieutenant placing a finger on his lips. _This’ll be our little secret._

Your left hand shakes. Not caused by involuntary nerve spasms, but of an enduring pent-up fury. “That’s not always the case, Arthur. The GCPD, they're rotten,” you tell him, though at the back of your mind, your thoughts still wander back to Burke treating you fairly. There’s old Garrity, too, and even Gordon. _But still. _“A lot of them are.”

“I-I know. But you're not like them. You're nice,” he admits, pursing his lips together, before retreating back to his cigarette. “You don't treat me like . . .”

You're a little tempted to not refuse his kindness. It comes so rarely in a hellhole like this. Though your sanity is beginning to become a skewed worn-down thing from that damned absinthe and you're split and scattered over the thought whether you're fighting for an opportunity to hide or that you just don't want to wind up alone in the night, restlessly awake and stuck in the madness of a bleary recurring paranoia from something.

You force out a smile, brittle and breaking as it is. “I don't want to impose, but it's sweet of you to offer.”

Swallowing down his words, he only nods. 

A minute or so passes by; discarding the burned-out cigarettes, the both of you walk from the side of the curb. He insists on following you there like a lost boy who can’t find his way back home. You don’t mind it. The truth is that you’re tipsy and a little lost yourself. You hail for a cab.

"Are we . . . can we still see each other?"

Then there's that adherent look in his eyes, pleading mutedly to you; it's grooved beneath them for such a time, as if he's been stepped on by too many rejections that leave him skinned raw and begrudgingly disappointed.

You don’t understand yourself for giving him a straight answer.

"Okay."

His spur of assertion surprises you. You've never really considered he has it in him. "Oh, uh, I'll write you my number," and then he fishes for a pen from his jacket and flips open his joke diary at the back, writing so sparingly from the corner in an otherwise blank page.

When Arthur tears down the whole page, you try not to grimace at the sound, or the way he folds the paper and tucks it on your hand like it's suggesting that it should be there, _yours, only yours_. You catch on for a beat that his fingers linger longer than it should on your palm after a momentary brush of skin.

There's a strange gleam in his green eyes. Invasive in the way that makes the hairs at the back of your neck stand.

He doesn't let go. _You're real this time, aren't you?_

". . . real," you murmur to nothing in particular before closing your mouth shut in bemusement. In a smooth lurch forward, a cab arrives next to the both of you, and you rush in the chance to step inside. You avoid his quizzical stare, his touch, everything. The note lays crumpled in your palm like a foul little secret that you attempt to bury deep down. "Arthur . . . I'll call you, if I can, all right?"

You make certain that there is this unspoken footnote in your tone that hints on a possibility but never really the swift assurance of a yes, though you contemplate if he ever reads between the lines of your purposeful ambiguity because while you are never the type of person to turn someone down for the sheer cruelty of it, you’ve always come across as politely indirect with your answers.

From the misty window of the cab, you wonder if he’s understood it because his gaze is telling a different story, seeing a different woman, making a different promise to another, because as he stares from that growing distance, his eyes wide like the moon beaming down at you, you doubt yourself more and rethink if what he’s reflecting back at you _is_ real.

_“You’ve cancelled two appointments recently.”_

_“I know. I—I’m sorry, Dr. Martin. Honestly, I came because I need another prescription slip. I’ve run out of meds. I-I can’t sleep . . . I can’t think straight these days, I just need—”_

A stronger dose of benzodiazepine. You pop in three pills before the eventual fall.

In the darkness, there’s a gunshot. A crimson clown.

Keys, clocks, locks, laundry—

Another blackout. Another episode of heated complaints and cut-off power shortage. Again with the strikes, again with the tireless excuses booming on monotonous public announcements. Everyone’s suffering for it, like some sidelined joke. Someone must’ve gotten robbed on the second floor. Still, no one cares.

From the wall, the killer clown sneers at you.

_Do you?_

“I don’t know.”

Heavy-lidded and muddled, you glance around and everything’s still dark and private and real. More real than your mind has behaved. You feel a bit flighty, lightheaded. Your nose pinches. It smells dank, a lot like discount alcohol, dead cigarettes, and something old and rotting under the bed.

When the back of your hand slides down from your lap and comes into contact with something cold, you freeze. Then you notice the empty cheap liquor bottles next to you. A sigh pushes out of from your mouth, but the tension never does. You drink a little more and wonder if it ever ends. The blackout or the turmoil? It doesn’t matter.

Sometimes, alcohol is the companion that you like to keep with you when there’s no one. You hate to think that it’s true.

Then there’s that critical low point where you’ve reached a kind of disassociation, just careening towards the borders of stagnancy and raging insomnia. You can’t work like this when the case—the senseless chase—is all that matters now, and a well-kept part of you is rampaging deep-inside, revving up your bones, throbbing in your veins an age-old indignance. It’s ceaseless, too. Defiant against your sound judgment. Though you’re getting used to it; the city and your mind in shambles. 

You can’t remember a simpler time in your life, after all. It’s as if a strip of grainy film has been dashed over by psychotic controlling mothers and drunken bouts and busted gaslight leers; perhaps burned with acid, perhaps soaked in cynical dreams.

However, there’s a dream that you do remember, crawling at the back of your mind through a carmine storm, made from a scream and a cloud of calloused hands seeking to molest and mold and mar you into a shallow echo of a woman. The lightning strikes. It ends with laughing smoke.

There’s a knock on your window.

With two cups of coffee, Burke sends you a reproachful glare. “God, Starling, you suicidal?”

You roll your eyes. After rolling down the window, you groggily reach for the cup that he offers you and help yourself with a gulp. You don’t mind the coffee scalding on your tongue. Your throat’s been so dry recently and your lips are chapped, almost a crack away to breaking skin. 

Playing at the background, the GCR broadcast that you’ve been listening to moments ago is replaced by some kind of third-rate soap. On cue, there's a tired comedic scene with Missus, her voice like a bell, smiling sugary-sweet probably, after a pouty _'Hmph, I'm going to stick my head on the oven!'_ and in that old-time nondescript sequence, Mister goes for a flippant _'Oh, honey!'_

_That's supposed to be funny?_ You scoff and turn the knob for another station; the sad sultry blues whizzing in the white noise. Patsy Cline. Reminiscing over some uncharted part of your mind, you recall that your mother is an avid fan of the late singer. She used to play her best hits in vinyl every late afternoon—of course, when she’s not drunk.

“An angel’s voice that speaks to the soul,” you recite her words, humming absentmindedly to the slow tune. Patsy’s still singing at the forefront.

_I've got your memory  
Or, has it got me . . ._

“It smells like smoke in here, Starling,” comments Burke, welcoming himself inside the front seat.

Garrity follows after swinging the car door open at the back.

“I was so sure I had something with menthol awhile ago. Thought it’ll help,” you take one last sip of your coffee, catching Burke snort irately at your reply and the unlit scattered cigarettes crammed in the storage pockets. “So where next?”

“Ha-ha’s. At Gotham Square, Prince Street,” Burke says, tugging at his seatbelt.

“Ha-ha’s, huh,” you put the Corolla back into motion, pulling out from the trash-littered curb and driving onto the boulevard. You take a precursory glance to your watch. Eleven-eleven. The day has barely scratched the rush hour yet the road is already packed with light traffic, boiling under a thick murk of smoke exhaust and hot damp asphalt. You crank up the AC. “Got a lead?”

“Not me, Starling,” Burke sticks a thumb at his partner. “Ol’ Garrity here has a hunch.”

“Honest to God, I hope it’s right,” Garrity speaks up from the back. “The sooner we catch the bastard, the sooner we’d move on.”

Steering the wheel for a swerve, there are clown-masked protestors from the other side of the street, armed with their radical signs and convictions. _Kill the Rich. We are Clowns._ It resonates louder than any passing tempest. “You think the riots will stop if he’s caught?”

“Will it matter if it is?” Burke says, scrutinizing the people gathering outside. “Caught or not, the people got their inspiration. They’re not going back down now. Not when they’re heard.”

“Yeah, I could see that,” you agree before a wry smirk curls up your mouth. “Lieutenant’s going to have a hard time on that one.”

“He’s been busting his ass about it for a week. Lieutenant Gordon is—"

“Gordon?” you repeat, confused. “Burke, what do you mean . . . Gordon's the Lieutenant?”

It’s Burke’s turn to send you a look of disbelief. “He is, Starling. Just promoted. Christ, have you slept over the rest of the week?”

Your fingers twitch at the thought, restive and taut hard against the wheel, synapses in disarray. Clammy palms. There’s a greenlight on the road. Vehicles herd your Corolla like rabid blaring beasts, aggressively rushing towards the smoke storm. You give in to the chase, trying to live up to an expectation in this uproarious road that you can’t keep up with.

“Gordon's replaced Strauss just four days ago after he died,” Burke continues on with the conversation.

_The bastard died. _Adrenaline. _How. _You must be on a high right now. You’re tragically ecstatic.

“You know . . . the killer clown’s handiwork all over again.”

_But how can I not remember the rest of it? _Your jaws lock together, as you rove through all the clutter and moldy benzos floating in your head. Your left hand trembles. You make for another swift turn. Break. Gas pedal. The lights are going off. _On, off, on, off. _A glistering red.

“Tentative on that, Burke. It could’ve been easily one of those followers of his,” Garrity intervenes, muttering something about his disapproval on the matter to himself.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s the actual killer or one of those punks,” Burke argues. “Strauss got shot five times. That’s another statement right there, plain and simple.”

_The killer clown. _It just doesn’t add up. Something builds up, wracking violently at the nerve-endings of your spine, corroding your insides until all that’s left rising up, up, _up_ your throat is vitriolic bile. _Oh, God. _What day is it? How many days have gone? The last time you’ve seen Strauss, it’s about less than a week ago. You question yourself. You doubt.

Your skeptic memory spirals like a reel-tape, re-wired, jammed. It’s an impending image branded in your mind.

A finger pressed between his lips. A red smile. _This’ll be our little secret._

_What’s real anymore?_

“—hey, Starling?”

“_Here._” You stomp on the break. Everything stops at a stand-still. You suck in a drawn breath through your teeth. “I mean, we’re here. Ha-ha’s. Uh . . . I-I think I’ll park somewhere and maybe sit this one out. I think I got a little lightheaded.”

Garrity opens the door at the back. “You heard Starling, Burke.”

Burke is still on a mental debate, whether it’s safe to leave you by yourself or to send you home for your recent behavior. Likely filling in out for you with excuses of sleep-deprived, overworked, neurotic, and the unimpressive list must’ve gone on. “All right,” he abides, untying his seatbelt. “Easy on those cigs, Starling. I mean it.”

“Sure, sure,” you wave your hand at him, maintaining an image of insouciance. Your left hand is still shaking. “I’ll offer you one if you caught me red-handed.”

“Right,” Burke deadpans. “Hm, you need an aspirin or something? You look like shit.”

_I feel like shit too, thanks. _You snort out a creaky laugh. “No. I’ll get over it. Ah, Garrity’s calling.”

“Just rest this one out,” is the last thing Burke says before closing the car.

Alone. _Finally._ But Patsy’s still haunting you at the front, belting out in her angel voice.

_And it still looks the same_ _  
As when you gave it, dear_

Without a moment of hesitation, you forage for your bag, your purse, your cards, anything because you _do_ remember something important, something that might clue you in on what’s make-believe and what’s not.

_I’ve got these little things _ _. . . she’s . . ._

“—got you.”

The note is still with you. That embarrassingly crumpled secret that holds some evidence to your sanity. You can see his chicken-feet handwriting, just at the shiest farthest corner of the page. Then an awkward scribble under it like a bad signature, a pat to your memory. Arthur.

_You're real this time, aren't you?_

Once you’re out of the car, you walk as if your feet have a will of their own. Lost in the maze of the city square, you hound for the nearest telephone booth in Gotham Square. That's until a gust hits at you like a slap to the face and steals the note from your grasp.

Overhead, fluttering about to and fro, the note grows little wings and the crowd must’ve mistaken it for a mocking jay. It croons to you, beckons for you, _come for me, come for me_. And you do like a fool, blind to the abysmally gray world of monotony and weary faces, deaf to the song of sirens, the incessant chatter, the cars honking on the road.

The note flies and flies, and you reach and reach.

Grazing it by the finger nail, you hold your breath. _There, almost there._

Green light. A truck hurtles towards your direction, tires screeching for a halt, blaring aloud like a high wicked laugh. In that instant, the last thing you see is the driver dressed as a clown. 

You gasp.

The unbidden lingering desperation remains, and the last sensible battle you deal with is a struggle between lacking a strong dose of benzos and going with it through the distraction of a self-imposed orgasm. An attempt, that is. Your world view turns into a one-eighty and you're lying down your back on your bed, naked legs already spread open for no one.

Sucking in a sharp breath, you palm over your breast, thinking of another hand hovering over you; groping, molding to the softness, pinching at the tip. You don't mind the tease. You sigh when your hand—or perhaps, _his_ hand dips the plane of your stomach, trenching over the lips between your thighs. Everything else becomes a tacky effort for friction and you're struggling at the thought because despite your reluctant willingness, you can't even get yourself wet.

Then something in the shadows settles. Quiet and intriguing and mysterious. Somewhere along the lines, the fine thread of reality and delusion blurs. The hideous image that colors itself in bold crimson and green and white comes to life once your eyes flit open.

There’s a smile in the dark. Your heart’s hammering loud from your chest. You wrench for a rough shape of a shoulder. Tug, twist, twine, he doesn’t relent. He’s smothering you. There’s no slow-burn to cling onto, no name to curse through his mouth. You gasp out from slick fingers that lap along your clit like a tongue, knee jerking back, legs trembling over that edge. You’re falling towards a nosedive. A crash collision close to . . . _to . . ._

A cry bleeds through the paper-thin walls.

_Find me. _A beckon, a promise made for you, before you’re washed in his colors and the fever dream fades.

There’s a knock on your window.

With a cup of coffee, Garrity sends you a reproachful glare. “God, Starling, are you suicidal?”

_What the hell. _The radio is still playing Patsy’s melancholia from the oldies station.

_I really don't know  
_ _But I know, it won't let me be . . ._

You check your watch. Eleven-fucking-eleven. Frantically fingering the note on your coat pocket, you breathe in a little deeper upon knowing it’s still there, like a memory refusing to be buried alive. Moved by some inexplicable adrenaline, you kick your car into gear, and before Garrity’s having half a mind to question you for pulling out that moment, you leave without even shouting out a good excuse.

Somehow, time passes you in an interval of bleeping neon and crazy highspeed taillights. The Corolla’s faster than you’ve ever driven it, rip-roaring in a tide of sweeping vehicles that go for the mad dash away from the busy traffic and the stoplight that’s about to blink red. You park haphazardly at the curb of a random sidewalk and bolt out the door to run towards the nearby telephone booth.

Then the rain arrives.

Like a struck-down bird, the note slips from your palm and falls. It nearly drowns in a puddle, but you save it from the brink of shriveling away. You save yourself from shriveling to pieces. Just because it carries a special piece of you. Something no one knows. A jigsaw to the puzzle. A missing rhyme to the riddle.

But the scribble is smearing in the drenched paper, growing tiny red-black roots at the numbers as if reaching for you in a final desperate attempt to touch you, to mark you, ink like blood, blood on skin, curving along the fine rings of your fingertips. Pushing away the old woman going in the telephone booth, you squeeze in the compartment in a lunge, ignoring the curse and the enraged slam on the glass door echoing behind you.

You punched in the dials, remembering the numbers, branding them in your head because their bleeding in wet paper. A smudge of a memory. Then the wait, the excruciatingly long wait. You count the seconds. One, two, three . . . seven, eight . . . fourteen.

_C’mon, answer. Answer me . . . _

Someone decidedly picks up. You hold a breath.

On the other line, there’s a soft hesitant voice. Familiar, too familiar. “_Who is this?_”

You tightly grip on the telephone. “Arthur?”

It’s his turn to murmur your name. Then a sputter of a surprised laugh. “_I-it’s you! It’s really you!_”

_Thank God, you’re real. _You smile, chuckling out a sob of relief, as your head leans against the glass wall.

“Arthur,” you say his name again, and he sighs. “Can I see you?”

A tick of a ballpoint pen.

“So what’ll you have?”

“. . . sorry?” you mumble under your breath.

Everything no longer pans out of focus; but your eyes are still indecisive, cloudy and dust-ridden, tracing over the tearing edges of the laminated menu card wedged between your hands.

_When, _you’re supposed to ask, mouth parted, breaths even, splitting open for a clearer _when did I get here,_ but then the silvery notes come pouring in your ears like a train of silk; a purple tune thrumming, piano like dewdrops, like a drizzle that soothes a shattered mind, _‘if sometimes you see that I’m mad, don’t you know no one alive can be an angel?’_

“Take your time, angel,” says a woman—the waitress, you think, as she resumes back to humming along the song, tapping her pen on her notepad. You don’t bother reading her nametag. Her face is oversaturated in amber-green and cyan blue from the neon lights outside.

“Uh, who’s,” you start abruptly, following the lonesome flow of the music to an old jukebox from the corner of the room. “You know the song?”

“That? Not really, just the singer. Know of Nina Simone?”

_Nina Simone._ That sounds familiar, somehow. “Thought I heard her somewhere before, I think . . . umm, can I just order later? I’m waiting for a friend.”

“Oh. Sure, sure, angel. Later then.” A click, a flip of a notepad, an offbeat hum echoing; and she’s gone, blending in the faded walls of the diner. _There aren’t a lot of people_, you note, and the what few customers that stay here are no more but shadows skulking about, flickering on and off from an outline of dripping yellow light.

Your left hand is trembling. Your breaths are stifled, stuck on your throat. _Not again, not again._

You shove a cigarette on your lips, teeth clenching at the filter, as you fumble on your lighter that can’t even spit out a lick of flame at the butt. _Fucking useless. You’ve gotta be—_

Someone clears his throat next to you. “You need a light?”

Craning your neck to the side, you feel a sigh of relief give way to your mouth, as if you’ve been shooting a lit cigarette in the first place, when your eyes do the talking, greeting him with a welcome glance. “Yeah, sure,” you accept the flick of a lighter and another shuddering sigh, swirling up at him like a thin gauzy veil. Arthur waits for an interval and drinks on second-hand smoke.

Once you gesture him in the booth with a bob of your head, he slides in the blue faux-leather couch across you, and mirroring your habit, he lights a cigarette for himself. You observe.

Appearances can be telling. His hair is noticeably damp and slicked back after several attempts on flattening them down by a nervous hand; however, his curls are sticking out at the ends, waving back after a tousle, blotting wet patches on his collar. While it’s easier to assume that it’s from the rain, it immediately gives you the impression that he’s just come out of a quick shower.

That’s only because what sticks out to you is that he’s always smelled like cigarettes, though there’s that whiff of cheap cologne hanging off him like woodsmoke.

Then there’s those green eyes. You can appreciate their vividness, but you can’t find it in yourself to like the way they stare at you; imploring, intense, brightly invasive, glistening at you as if he’s known you for years.

Still, you smile because he’s here. Because he’s real.

“We can’t keep meeting up like this,” you say.

For a beat, Arthur is startled by your words.

“Like what?” his voice tapers off into an insecure drop, suspecting that he must’ve done something wrong.

You only wonder how can he give this impression of a little boy that’s about to be scolded right now. You only have yourself to blame when your inflections always sound razor-sharp to the ear. “Like how one of us has a useless lighter,” you attempt to bring the levity back in your exchanges. “Gets a little redundant, don’t you think?”

He’s relieved, throttling over a strangled laugh. He’s dampening it down to a distorted sound at the base of his throat. “_Ha—_oh, I-I don’t mind,” he confesses, curling up a small smile. “I get to bring the useful one whenever I see you.”

_There it is. _That child-like quality radiating off him in strange ways that no one will ever think come from a man who looks so slumped down from the day-to-day pressures lumping on his shoulders. You won’t call it endearing. It’s more eerie and quietly unsettling than you put it, like delicate china at the edge, that in another time, perhaps in a bad day, might collapse onto itself and break. Cut.

It’s one of those things that you prefer to remind yourself because that’s how the city gets under your skin and eats you inside.

Before you can throw back a reply, the waitress interrupts the two of you. “Your order.”

Sliding the menu card to him, you ask, “What do you want?”

Arthur blinks at you, then at the menu card. “Oh—ah, I’m not hungry.”

As he waves his hand in trepid dismissal, you see his wrist bent; bony-thin and bruised and gnarled with veins, billowed over by the shallow cuff of his sleeves. You prompt. “Arthur, I insist. It’s my treat.”

His mouth gapes open for a second more. He sends you a considering look before stealing one back at the menu. “Just a cup of coffee,” he says, still so meek with his order. His head dips low, nestled between his shoulders, but his eyes peer back at you under those mess of curls, not even sparing an interested glance at the waitress.

You nod, leaning idly against the palm of your hand. “I’ll have what he’s having and some biscuits.”

After a final scribble, the waitress recites back the order and leaves.

“You called.”

“Were you expecting someone else?”

“No, I wasn’t. Just,” he says, coming at you a little strongly. “Just you.”

“I didn’t think you’d answer,” you admit, shrugging.

“I was always waiting for you.”

Then the waitress intervenes with two clean cups and a plate of biscuits. There’s a fleeting glimpse of distaste from her at the sight of Arthur when she pours him coffee, and when she stares at you, sizing you up that moment with a slight frown, you think it must be pity.

You don’t dwell too deep into it. It’s a slippery-slope, and you’re not in the mood to be upset over a half-baked assumption. “Help yourself,” you nudge the plate of biscuits to him after taking one and dipping it on the steaming black brew.

He almost chokes on his coffee. “Oh, I really don’t . . .” 

You chew thoughtfully. “You’re really going to deny this now? Go on, take one.”

Nodding, he complies abashedly. He looks like he hasn’t eaten properly for days. Hasn't had a wink of repreive in a span of years. He's fidgeting again; jaw taut back, a hand picking on a loose thread of his cuff, his leg shuddering under the table like a ticking time bomb that's about to implode. 

Will he, though? Into a million tiny sutures. The idea isn't as lonely as you surmise it is. 

You almost laugh. The both of you complement each other’s brood and wasted fatigue.

“We make quite a pair, don’t we? We both look terrible.”

He only takes a halfhearted bite of his biscuit and swallows. “But you don’t look—”

“No need for that,” you snort, smoking. “You had a rough day?”

Arthur crosses his arms, hands wringing over his sleeves as he closes in on himself. “Yeah . . . my mother kept some things about me,” he admits with a dry chuckle, almost forgetting the cigarette balanced precariously on the edge of his mouth. “It’s just a lot to take in,” and then breathes on it, biting on the filter, dropping hot ashes on his calloused fingers.

His face is a map of troubled creases and sleepless deep-set contemplation. Maybe in bitterness, maybe in loathing. He doesn’t tell a thing. He seems to resent it so much to ever disclose a word of it.

You don’t trouble him any further by asking more questions. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he assures you, trying and failing to ease back into a smile. “What about you?”

You take a long sip of your coffee. “What about me?”

“You,” he gouges for your reaction; lips pursed in thought, eyes blindly hopeful, “why do you want see me?”

You grope for words. “I only wanted to know . . .” and then at the corner of your eye, a red silhouette waltzes by outside in a streamline of green whirling fog. Your head slowly turns. “That’s,” _a goddamn clown, _you realize, struggling to take in a breath, as your cigarette falls and the grip on your coffee loosens, spilling fat splotches on the table, on your trousers. Snapping you back to the diner. “Shit, _shit._”

There’s nothing staring back at you from the window but your crazed reflection.

Bunching up a few wads of tissue paper on your palm, you wipe out your mess; it’s such a hideous color, scalding, staining the table brown, like dried blood against the cold pavement. _Get a damn grip._

“Hey,” then Arthur mumbles your name, wrapping a handkerchief over your burned fingers. “Hey, are you okay?” calmer this time, concerned and unsure and a bit anxious himself over seeing you agitated.

However, damned as you are to admit it, that soft tone cracks you a little inside. _Too sincere,_ you think. _Why. _“No, Arthur. I’m not,” you whisper; your left hand lost to unwound nerves. In, out, on, off. “_Christ_, I’m not.”

He tries, again. Reaches for you, again. “Is there something I could do?”

You’re scatterbrained. Easy steps. Breath in, out. In, out.

_Meds . . . where are my meds . . ._

“Please,” he tells you. “Talk to me.”

“I don’t know,” you say, shakily plucking out your cigarette from the table. You inhale deeper, letting the sharp taste of tobacco cut at your tongue. Let it bleed there a bit more. “I . . . I must be going out of my mind. Nothing makes sense anymore, I think, and this might sound crazy and I don't blame you, I really don't, but I'm glad. I'm glad you exist. That you're here.”

"I . . . I'm glad, too," he holds your hand, gently lacing your fingers with his. "To be with you."

And God, he _means_ it. But you don't feel that way. You know you don't and you know it'll break him if you admit what you feel.

"Arthur."

He leans down to your face, thinking it's an invitation. It _isn't. _

You dare to ponder if this is another lapse in reality because you don’t want this to happen. This misunderstanding, this tension unravelling from the seams. He’s closer now, so unbearably close.

Placing a hand to his chest, you stay very, very still. ". . . is any of this still real?"

His fingers reach to touch the side of your jaw, as if he's wondering himself if you’re just hoax and gossamer.

Your name leaves his lips, like a prayer. "I want to believe it is."


	2. la petite mort

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] Finally.
> 
> [2] This is perhaps the most abstract and confusing of the three parts. I won't blame you for being frustrated, but reader might as well be undergoing her lowest point and this is a mess. Best thing I can say is question everything.
> 
> [3] Arthur isn't a good person. He could be, but no, I don't think so. Just very flawed. But fucked-up? Yes, very, very much.
> 
> [4] 4/17/20: minor edits.

_ **2** _

_ **.** _

_“I thought—you, we . . . I-I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I just . . .” _

_He kisses you. _You don't kiss him.

That's the half-lie and half-truth you both believe in. Before matters go out of hand, you're the first to break away from the unravelling threads of his story. As your mind recovers from a mild stupor, you mull over many complicated things, like how meticulously stitched together this entire ploy is.

It’s like one of those mock crime scenes in the academy. One needs to be astute in detail to understand the big picture. The evidence is written all over his guilt-ridden face, and the trails lead back to you with the taste of damp nicotine lapping on your tongue and the lingering warm friction on your lips. From the coffee or someone’s mouth crushed against yours, you don’t know. You guess.

The brown shadows across the diner aren’t whispering a word to themselves. His hand remains shackled to your wrist, nowhere near the curve of your cheek. _Not like awhile ago_, you think.

Arthur is just staring at you, watching it unfold with his green eyes. _Did we . . . ?_

“Arthur,” you say slowly. “I don’t know.”

He clears his throat. “About what?”

“I . . . I don’t know what to feel.”

“I’m sorry.”

Then it clicks. Then you _think_.

You’re not certain if it’s just as much as a lie than oblivious honesty for your part. “For what?”

Imploring wordlessly through his gaze, he reasons out to you. “For what happened . . . I, uh, you—”

“I panicked,” you interrupt him, regaining your memory. “I spilled my coffee.”

“Yeah, you did . . . but,” at the very end of the word is a tail-end of an afterimage, flashing with the taste of his nicotine-bitter lips and his tongue laving against the roof of your mouth. You wonder if he sees it, too.

There’s a beat of silence. No one rewards anyone with validation.

So it turns into a fleeting thought. An incursion. _Empty_, through and through.

Breathing in your cigarette, you question him. “But?”

Arthur doesn’t know how to answer. When he draws in his cigarette close to him, he wavers for a second and absentmindedly traces his lower lip; maybe he’s recalling something, maybe he’s hoping there’s a light smear of lipstick at the corner of his mouth. You can hear the tapping of his foot under the table, leg bouncing like an unearthed tremor.

When he realizes there’s nothing to salvage, he then resigns back to nicotine.

You do the same and let the smoke consume you alive.

Your eyes flutter open, and at the back of your head, you can see the intense blue of a fluorescent light somewhere, eerily stagnant and foggy against a lick of harsh orange gleaming from the windowsill and the midnight shadows that encapsulate the room in a still semi-darkness. _On and off_, it buzzes. _On, off, on, off._ You reflect about it for awhile until you realize that you're not unconscious from a drunken episode on the floor anymore, sinking in deep sleep during a hot sticky afternoon, sweltering under the fever of an excruciating hangover.

_Like Ma_, you recall with a hint of disgust.

You’re losing track of time again. Somehow, you can’t remember the resigned walk that's dragged from a slow rumbling elevator to the stiff embrace of your couch. _Not as stiff_, you realize, when your body is engulfed in mildew softness. From the corner of your eye, you stare at a swirl of smoke from the ashtray, still freshly lit and smoldering. You reach for it in a vain attempt for reprieve. The scent is strong, distinctly pungent. _Winston._

The smoke's getting into your head again, it seems. It spins when it does. Makes slow unamusing twirls and, _and—_

This isn't actually your apartment.

"Oh, you're awake."

". . . who," you mumble under your breath, searching for that hushed voice. You cock your face up a little, but your sight is failing in clarity and what steadies you in your mild blindness is a hand comfortingly pressed atop your head. "Arthur . . . Arthur, is that you?"

Your name on his lips feels like a caress. "You shouldn't be up yet. You still need to get some more rest."

You stir. The moment you attempt to sit up, you feel the world convulse around you. Your body collapses back into a boneless heap of nerves and tense aching limbs. It's the same kind of feeling you hate; _that_ feeling when you know your muscles throb dully from a day's worth of overtime and only then when you finally plunge in on the mattress does the pain deepen, bones screaming at the sides, back breaking in that sinking comfort, making you hinge in between a restless wakefulness and fatigue.

Grunting, you lean onto his weight bouncing from the couch. There's a delicate warmth from his sweater brushing against your calf and his long fingers are still gently threaded in your hair.

There’s that scent again. Something like smoke and sweat and warm skin. You peer up through heavy-lidded eyes and linger on a bruise on his wrist and the scratches on his palm. You think of scuffles, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to get roped into brawls. A thumb brushes over your brow and your eyes trace the thin scar carved above the seam of his lip. There’s a subtle edge on that cut that you’re still trying to figure out about him.

“You drove me here, uh, to my apartment,” Arthur starts, offering you a glass of water that you accept, “but, well, you fell unconscious on your car, shaking and all . . . I can't just leave you like that so I carried you all the way here.”

As the blanket slips from your shoulders, you feel the cold bite at your arms.

He stares at that thin strap dangling from your shoulder for a long second before averting his eyes away. You tug up the blanket to your chest, inwardly chastising yourself for not wearing anything beneath your camisole. You still can’t help the conscious thought that he can see you underneath, sketching a mental outline of your body with those scrutinizing eyes.

He’s as flustered as you are, if not more when he’s already struggling on his words, strangled by his tittering and the tight knot constricted on his throat. Legs agitated, hands flying up to clamp down his mouth, his head shakes as if he’s about to burst. There’s an urgent plead in his eyes, broken down into fragmented regret.

Then the trigger. Then the explosive peals of laughter that weep out of his lips like an open wound. It’s such a foul harrowing sound; one that rattles deep into the bones in an ebullition of some sort. There’s an interval of gazes locking between you two. The moment he notices you recoil back, he crumples down into something smaller; cut-open by the raw strength of his laughter, rasping out of his gullet, and slicing through the air into a rapturous howl.

Wringing on his empty pockets, he attempts to string up his words, but flinches with clenched teeth after a furious _shut up_ echoing from the upper floor. His face is flat against the palms of his hands, trembling from his affliction, wheezing out stammers in painful iterations. You can hear it hoarsely scratch out of his throat whenever he tries and tries and tries.

It’s the tears that catch you off guard. The weakness spilling from his eyes and dribbling from his mouth in poignant chuckles: “. . . _ha_, c-condition _ah ha ha ha_—co-condition . . . so s-sorry, _ha ha _. . . sorry, sorry _ha ha ha ha!_”

Your left hand trembles, but it reluctantly reaches for his shoulder. You’re a little afraid of him. You don’t understand the unspoken tragedy behind his laughter, though you’re still afraid that if you touch him, he’ll shatter.

“Arthur,” your voice is still uneasy, hoarse, and breathy from sleep, but it’s softer, and _shit, I’m bad at this_, “Arthur . . . just breathe, okay? It’s . . . it’s all right. Just breathe. Take your time. I,” you wait for a beat, counting on futile seconds, “—I’m here. It’s all right.”

Your name stutters out of his lips. “. . . sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

Arthur grapples at your hand by the end of it. You wait while your world spins and stops around him.

Sniffling, he mumbles in a slow steady voice, “It’s a . . . condition. The laughing. I can’t control—I mean, I’m sorry. I must’ve, ah, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeats until he notices the blanket draped over your shoulders, veering the matter away to another.

He’s calmer now, but the tension on his shoulders still rolls off him in waves. “Oh . . . ah, your blouse. It’s folded here. Well, you see, when you woke up the first time, you threw up on the bathroom,” he purses his lips. “You got some on your blouse. So, uh, I-I had to remove it.”

_That’s embarrassing_, you think. There's an acrid taste on your tongue and a strain on your gut. But.

“I can’t remember,” you admit, bemused. “Arthur, I’m really sorry for that. Being such an inconvenience.”

He assures you that it’s fine with a flit of a smile, and after he skirts back to the kitchen to fish out a bottle of aspirin, he makes the offhanded effort to offer you some leftover soup for compensation earlier. He’s a bit embarrassed about it, you can tell. His fridge is empty and it’s apparent enough that he doesn’t have much of an appetite.

You deny the offer with a polite _‘no thank you’_ and recline back on the couch, bracing yourself for an imminent migraine at the back of your head.

However, you still find the will to be distracted and lean so dangerously close to your curiosity. There’s a coppery glint in the dark. It takes the form of a bullet sitting atop the length of an old sock. Your fingers tremble a little at the thought. You remember the distinct size and shape of it from the autopsy lab, pierced deeply in bone and pallid flesh. You _reach_ for it.

Behind you, Arthur looks at you with those big concerned eyes. You tense.

“You look a little pale . . . uh, is there something wrong?”

When you gaze up at him, you dismiss everything; the secret under the couch and the ghost of a .38 caliber gun.

Your lips curl up into a weak smile. “It’s nothing.” _It’s nothing._

You go out of your way to take the subway that's heading to downtown Gotham. The train arrives in a loud hiss; rusting and sibilant like some kind of metal python within Gotham's heart. In its underbelly, the compartment is congested with people and the rank of sweat and the city's stench. It screeches back to life, slithering forward to the stifling smog and the bleak apocalyptic lights of the cityscape.

Your eyes are vigilant to the crowd around you; some wearing suits, some in rags. Does the killer clown sit here? Or is he upright, clutching tight on a grab handle? Tipping over, a foot anchored over the other, an imbalance between a stand-still and an uneventful fall. Does he skulk around these seedy corners? Does the world move him in its unfair mundanity, like these abiding people? Broken, bent, burned-out, waiting for the day to end and stagger on again for a miserable tomorrow. Does he care who he’s going to kill? Does he know who he’s killed?

While a cold-blooded death doesn’t serve as a proper retribution, those Wayne brokers shouldn’t have warranted the media’s sympathies on the case of their murder.

You've seen their records before. Bryan Morrison and Charles Buchanan Jr. have been arrested because of sexual assault, aggravated battery, harassment, and public intoxication. The latter has been allegedly claimed as a serial rapist after being filed a lawsuit by one of his co-workers; a battle surely won by Buchanan for lack of evidence—_or bribery_. Then there’s Lloyd Peter Scott. While tamer than the last two, there’s a rumor circling about him that he’s once gotten into money laundering before joining Wayne Enterprises.

Then there’s Strauss. Another unexpected death with no viable connection.

They all have dirt on their hands. Enemies and old grudges aren’t so far-fetched. But the dots aren’t adding up, and it’s leading you nowhere to a man dressed as a clown. Why a _clown_, in the goddamn first place?

_Unpremeditated murder. _You've always considered it, despite the blatant show of contempt. However, doesn't hate crime often root from an impulse of passion?

Suppose the murderer is browbeaten and tired from a day's work in an unfulfilling career as a party clown. Suppose he always carries a gun around because—honestly, who won't nowadays? Gotham holds the pedestal of being one of the most dangerous cities in the country. There's no greater joke in here than its guaranteed security and insurance.

Self-defense or for simply adhering to Gotham's prevalent gun culture, it's simple for him to buy a .38 off an underground arm's dealer.

This time, let's say he is provoked by those Wayne brokers. It's only the four of them and a scuffle builds up, fueling him to take up arms. He isn't really a good shot. Not formally trained and not even a decent marksman, just sloppy and new to the feeling; the weight of the gun on his palms, the trigger.

The first one starts in an unrepentant aim. The second one must've misfired twice. The third one is hunted down. There's a persistent meandering tune there. A sweet music of carnage with the brutal percussion of bullets on flesh. Sharp and ringing hollow to the ear, the gunshot sings in the dark, louder than the blood pounding on his ears, louder than a monotonous cheerless crowd. Rage, a strong unadulterated rage. In difference in class, or privilege, perhaps?

Or a manifold of complicated things, webbed together in a series of unfortunate circumstances.

He leaves their corpses behind like a messy trail. One will think that he's into theatrics. The macabre mise-en-scène, the spent tension still hanging thick in the air. Serial killers love putting details into their killings after all. Garrity believes this to be the case to support the theory that the murderer has intended to weave this narrative and make an unvoiced statement. You still lean on the myriad of options that step away from that.

_So he's killed them, what now? _

He runs. Because he panics, because there's no other way out of the madness but to run. It's so simple to cover up a murder in this corrupted city and put the blame on some other clown. Though he's so stupid to not think this through well enough and incredibly lucky too, for getting away with it.

Then the exposure. Then the citizens' symbol. Then the subtle power behind that movement.

Just because of a fool.

The media’s backlash does nothing but do wonders for him. He must be thriving in that attention. You can see him too, sometimes. Smirking back at you with that wide, wide grin. Teeth crooked and shining, drawn lips an unapologetic red. Taunting.

"You're not real."

His hand is shaped like a gun, pointing at you.

_Bang._ He mouths the smoking shot, winking. "_Now, now. That's_ rather rude of you."

He performs a pirouette. A hop to his step here, a graceful twirl there. "You're so close to catching me, aren't you? So close, you could almost feel me under your skin."

“You’re not fucking real,” you murmur under your breath.

"But, but—_alas!_ You don't fucking believe that, darling," he smirks at you with a mocking laugh. " Maybe instead of questioning _me_, you should ponder on the more interesting ones, no?"

You throw a hard glare at him. ". . . will you ever go away?"

He cackles. The hideous sound echoes through your soul.

The train stops. So does the world.

In the academy, your peers call you an overachiever. In the office, a workaholic. In the quiet of your head, you like to think you’re more overindulgent in your ambitions. A gold star, a good job, a big dream; you still have one of those, even when you’re wading in the filthiest gutter imaginable.

And it all starts with a clown at gunpoint.

You know you’re more optimistic than this; when you always find the mind-numbing drive to wake up in a spontaneity of short hours, black coffee at hand and a cigarette on your lips, and all the gritty bitterness coating on your tongue as you start anew in another grey morning. You have everything to prove and you come to Gotham with nothing left to lose.

Fresh out of Xanax, again. The night is long and oppressive, and it paints your bedroom in splashes of indigos and deep-sea blues. Trapped within a wretched humidity under the sheets, you’re pressed against something . . . _someone_, you correct yourself, moaning like a cheap whore.

And you dive down, down on sweet endorphins to the ocean of this frightful dream—his arms, his mouth, his everything—until you’re left sunken at the bottom, leaving you with the aftermath of a brooding Thursday morning with the feeling that you’re the lowest person stuck underneath the ancient catacombs of the city and the rail station.

There’s a crimson stain at the side of your lips, smudged in a way that curls up like a grin.

The imprint’s nothing more but a promise. _This'll be our little secret._

To your horror, you wake up finding a .38 caliber gun on your coffee table.

“_Starling, we finally got a possible suspect,_” says Burke on the other line of your telephone.

“Hm . . . who is it?” you ask; your breath caught on your throat.

“_His name’s Arthur Fleck. He used to work in this place called Ha-ha’s—_”

_Crazy, I'm crazy for feeling so lonely_ _  
I'm crazy, crazy for feeling so blue . . ._

It’s a quarter to eleven. At some point, in the midst of a riot, a blackout submerges the city square in darkness. You know how dark Gotham can be, and what small shred of wintry light that can shine through makes the world bleed in a muddy watercolor landscape.

As you drive through unprotected streets, you can’t fully see the people in sleepless shadow. Halogen lights mist over their persons into something half-alive and half-human. Something that dances between both.

Then it almost flashes to you in glaring spotlight. You don’t understand how you can find him when you’re lost yourself.

The both of you are united by chance in the middle of a sea of rapture and ultraviolence. Arthur seamlessly blends in that crowd, wilted and wandering and hopeless, with all the rain in his eyes. His nose is bleeding, and he’s letting it dribble down his chin, splitting from his scar to the base of his throat like a deep gash. _He just doesn’t care anymore._

You wonder if he can hear you.

If you can make him see you, somehow.

When the bleak fog in his eyes dissipates, they become so lucid and alive; so clear you almost compare them to twin disks of stained glass, where every rampant thought scratches to the surface in series of _why are you here_, _don’t look at me_, _how did you find me_ . . . _I want to see you_.

It’s a sudden invitation, but you offer a place to stay for awhile at your apartment until the lights come back if it means getting him out of this dump. Just seeing him mindlessly walking about here is one way of getting himself mugged. _Or worse._ He never takes the opportunity to refuse you.

“Oh, you’re, uh,” he mutters, handing you back your bloodied handkerchief.

“Just hold onto it for me,” you tell him, as he obliges, sitting uncomfortably next to you.

The ride becomes a silent affair, smooth-sailing to the weary blues of Patsy's voice. No one's swooning over her song down the road and you can’t really blame him for that. Crazy isn’t her best song; too much sap, too much needy despondence in the lonesome notes that spill more like thick slow tar than the sweet honey of her music.

That, and the both of you are just stuck somewhere, trapped in the black noise of your minds. You wish you can cure it with smoke, been attempting it for years, but you settle down with a sigh. The thin string of a long despondent sigh that might as well breathe out the same soppy song Patsy sings, stickily tripping over darker weaker notes of _wondering what in the world did I do?_

It’s funny, almost. You have a visitor in your empty-shell of an apartment for once.

“It's not really cozy in here. I'm sorry about that.”

“It's fine,” Arthur mumbles out, gaping at your apartment in dull curiosity. He decides on sitting on your stiff gray couch for the time being. There's a twinkle in his eyes as he fixates them on the cut-out newsprint tacked on the damask wallpaper. The killer clown's grin almost seems as if it’s smiling back at you, calling you out with a taunting _hey, remember me_. “That's the clown . . . in those subway killings, isn't it?”

He’s referring to your old friend plastered to the wall. _He’s referring to himself._

“Oh, that. Yeah. Um, I just needed to focus on something, I guess. I've been working on a case,” you say halfheartedly, noticing that he doesn’t spare you a glance when he’s still transfixed at the picture; treating it like some kind of black and white mirror. “That's not what he really looks like, hm?”

He shakes his head. His laugh is too telling.

Your smile turns brittle, as if it’s about to fall off your jaw. “What would you like to eat, Arthur? I was thinking of getting a take-out.”

He shakes his head again, anxiously pressing his hands together. “I'm not hungry.”

“You don't mean that,” you prompt, but you still sound so lackluster. “C'mon, I'm treating you a free meal.”

He reconsiders. “Uh, coffee's good?”

“That's not a meal, Arthur. Well, I'll think of something . . . hm, am I prying if I ask about,” you tap the tip of your nose, sitting next to him on the couch. 

Blinking, he swallows a breath. “No.”

“So what happened?”

Arthur looks uncertain. Lost. His leg shakes violently. A nervous tick, you note, when the cortisol goes haywire, plucking up the nerves like they’re threads about to snap simultaneously, synapses clapping in repeat. You feel the knuckles of your left hand tingle a bit. “Would you . . .” he starts, hesitant, “well, would you believe me if I told you Thomas Wayne hit me?”

Maybe, he's making it up. Maybe, he's seeing things again. Inexplicable things, daydreams, hallucinations. You've seen his medical records in Arkham State Hospital. He's on the right meds for it, you know, but. _But._

_Dr. Martin . . . if I-I don’t take my meds, it’s so hard to sleep, to think, to . . . s-so hard to see w-what—_

“_Wayne?_ Thomas Wayne,” you repeat in mild disbelief. “What did you do to even get hit like that?”

The words are scragged out of his teeth, hinting grievance. Frustration. Conflict. “I just wanted to talk. H-he wouldn't listen.”

You pry a bit more. “About . . . ?”

“Family matters. It's, um . . .”

_Family matters._ That's enough of a clue. He doesn’t elaborate further than that.

“It's okay. It must've been misunderstanding or something. Though I'm not sure why it'd warrant a broken nose.”

His head hangs low on his shoulders. “I must've made him uncomfortable . . . the truth makes people uncomfortable sometimes, doesn't it?”

“Yeah, the truth does that,” you say, resigning to a contemplative sigh. “Makes people lash out when it gets under their skin.”

Perhaps, a part of you wants to empathize. Yet it shrieks inside, this little slip of a secret. You're just so goddamn curious as to what relation he has with Thomas Wayne. How it connects to something, everything. You've been running for so long, dragging your feet at this point of the chase, where all things must meet their end. He's here. Intersecting so perfectly with your lofty ambitions. You can take him in, right now.

But something tugs at you. This is still Arthur, _and—_

He's begging for you with those green desperate eyes. “Can I . . . can I just stay the night here?”

“Hm, wouldn't your mother get worried if you don't come home?”

A pregnant silence.

“She's in the hospital.”

And the guilt clutches at you inside. The phone's feels like a hundred miles away, farther and farther beyond your reach.

“Oh, I'm sorry about that," you mean it, earnestly. God, you need a smoke. "The couch is a little uncomfortable, but I do have some extra blankets for you.”

“It's okay. Thank you,” he smiles. “Oh. And it . . . uh, it looks pretty on you.” 

You blink at him. _Pretty?_

When you throw a bemused look at him, your fingers consciously brush against your lips. A crimson rash thickly smears on your fingertips, a sticky crimson. Crusting under your nails. Pretty, he says. Your mouth twitches from the thought; a part of you hopes it bleeds out between your teeth, the other shudders behind a fractured smile.

_When did I start wearing lipstick—_

“. . . thanks.”

The morning after, Arthur disappears without a trace. When you lie down on the couch, you wonder if he’s ever really here in the first place.

The Lady of Perpetual Help Mental Institute is a desolate place. No one will have mistaken it for one of the rafts of neglected condos beside it; washed-out paint, graffitied walls, rusted barb-wire fences, barred entrances. It’s another ghost street in Gotham.

But you’re still wondering in disbelief. _My last visit was just about a week ago._

Peering into the looking glass, it's a glimpse of the absurd.

Inside the building, nurses skittered the grimy halls in their yellowing stained uniforms, guiding patients that might as well be hacking off blood, or bile, or whatever, from that rank coming from the trash bin in black roach-infested bags, replacing the smell of sterility. Sanitation is thrown out the window. Sick people keep on ramming up the rooms, cluttering the area like lost pallid ghosts.

_What’s real anymore?_

“Where's Dr. Martin?” you mutter under your breath. There’s a dirty-bronze nameplate on the counter, and by the looks of it, you can’t tell a lot in your daze; something unreadable and blotted out, despite the letters being drawn out so boldly. Confused and startled from an imminent migraine, you attempt to garble out your words, “I-I have an appointment.”

“Gone, Miss,” says a middle-aged woman—the hospital receptionist, you think, as she returns back to listing off a stack of papers; her undefined face like a smudge against a canvas. “You one of his patients?”

“Yeah. Well, it’s about my meds. Can’t get any without a doctor’s prescription, you see.”

“Oh, sorry about that. He's moved to Metropolis, I think . . . didn't he tell you?”

The question coldly drips down your chest. Shaky palms pressed frustratedly to your face, knees buckling over, all this blood-red heat that sweats down your neck; you lean down on the front desk with a sudden shortness in breath, peeling over like dry paint. You’re cracking and it’s showing so badly and you need your fucking benzos because your head’s about to blow-up and go short-circuit from the lack of relief, of sleep, of numbing calm. _And—_

“. . . I don't remember.”

It’s still a frigid reception. You contemplate if you’re only talking to another one of those automatons in the system. “Maybe, you should go home, Miss. We're closing in about an hour.”

You sputter out a humorless chuckle. “Since when do hospitals close down? It's just about a quarter to six.”

“It's already eleven. Besides, it's late now. Our funding got cut off, didn’t you know?”

“. . . _besides, you didn't find any reason to come back here before that anyway._”

Finally, it unfolds like one of those old motion pictures. You smile a little at that memory; your lips a deep crimson, like Strauss’s blood on the pavement.

“—‘m crazy . . . crazy for feeling so blue. Ah, I knew you'd love me as long as you wanted, hm-hmm,” you sang drunkenly, pushing the key in the lock, “and then someday you’d—hmm, something, something . . .” the door swings open and you stop.

You're not as surprised as you think you are when you see Arthur, drenched to the bone and lying down your couch, staring intensely on the ceiling.

You almost welcome him in your bemused silence in a way, debating whether he's real or not. Against your better judgement, an unvoiced desperate part of you hope he is.

But it must be another figment of a foul dream, you think. Some sick joke your mind has conjured for you.

Because as he's sprawled there, gangly legs propped limply at the arm rest, he's toying with your .38 caliber gun from his lap, caressing the holster with his thumb like a precious child. It's surreal with a dash of cruel irony.

You almost laugh.

_Going to kill me too, Arthur?_

"Arthur," you mutter from the closed door, "how did you get in here?" 

"Key."

"Why are you here?"

". . . I had a bad day," he says, slowly rising up. "You didn't call back."

"I'm sorry," you tell him, feeling numb and ghastly, and you’re still wondering why you’re playing along in this delusion. "You're soaked. You'll get a cold like that. You should be—"

Then Arthur is already next to you. An ice-cold hand wrapped around your wrist.

His eyes grow dim. It makes him look as deranged as you think him to be. "You're the only one that seems to care."

You cringe away, frowning from his words because they're not true. This is fiction. "You don't know that."

"I do. You do," he steps closer, cupping your face. “I-I want this. I want you.”

When his mouth descends to kiss you, there’s a silver lining of clarity, and this time, it frightens you. It's as if he knows what he truly wants and he isn't afraid to reap it anymore—just because he can. A part of you fights back. Your teeth cut in and he lets go.

_You're real. _You lose touch with yourself when your finger drifts back to his bottom lip, smearing it red with a lingering brush. Illusions don't bleed. His parted mouth whispers out a sigh. A shiver. Illusions don't breathe.

His phosphoric eyes prey down at you, luminous even in the dark. Feral, covetous—like a starved animal, too starved for affection, for lack of it. It simply bleeds out from that stare, hungry and salivating for you; simply by the way he holds you, the moment his mouth indulgently purses, licking off the blood from the cut, or perhaps the place where you've marked your stigma on him.

_I shouldn't have_, you know. God, you shouldn't have at all.

Your finger returns back to your lips, curious and entranced of the feeling when you stain them a dark crimson.

Arthur hauls you to him tighter, closer. You drag a breath. Cigarette smoke. Exhaust. Rain.

And you snap from the daze, gasping at the rough grip of his hands on your hips. "A-Arthur," you stammer out with a semblance of wakeful sanity. "I didn't mean to—"

He drinks down your voice, words stuck between his teeth, when his mouth seals yours with another swooping kiss. _But what do you want? _He never asks, and you’re too indulgent in his attentions to deny him now. Your fingers graze up his chest. You reciprocate by prying open his mouth, feverish and daring and tasting what you get; when the both of you are pressed so close to each other, like interwoven sinews in one body; when you feel him hard beneath his slacks. So shameless, so unapologetically desperate.

"I need you," he whispers to the curve of your neck, lips against your skin, nose to your hair. He inhales. "Please . . ."

It catches you off guard. How flaccid he sounds when he has no qualms ravaging your mouth mere seconds ago.

He breathes out your name again. Then his hand latches onto yours, fingers entwining, imploring.

"Lie down."

Blinking at you, he slinks back to the couch, and what little warm light that the room retains plays with his features; a sharp relief to his jaw, a bold contrast from the lining of his outstretched legs, and you're a blue shadow draping over him like ink against wet paper.

When he stares at you dropping atop his lap, you can't tell whether he's lying in anticipation or waiting for the right moment to pounce at you. He doesn’t seem to know what he should do when his hands steady your weight above him.

You’re lost, too; pandering and prying over the sopping folds of his shirt, the sparse hair of his chest, and those livid bruises. You don’t expect his skin to be so soft, sallow, and stretched thin from sharp protruding bones underneath. Grotesque. You feel his poverty-eaten ribs bite at your stomach like a row of fleshy teeth.

Yet he’s still so soft, so delicate, that you’re certain you can twist his wrist with a vice-grip, though something virile and darkly violent stirs within him. It’s brewing a storm in his eyes. Makes him unpredictable. Dangerous. You shudder out a breath, wetting your dry lips. He can hurt you.

But you can _break_ him.

When his knee starts to jerk anxiously, you glide your hand to the inside of his thigh, and Arthur gasps out your name at the firm grasp on his groin. You watch him and he watches you. Both of your eyes are locked and loaded and livid, stripping bedraggled clothes by blinks, peeling flesh by stares. But no one's making a move at it. There's just blatant eye-fucking going around you two, the wandering gaze of what I'll do here and there, this and that, turn you over and under, while the stagnant question still dangles between your breaths in a short _can I . . ._

However, it's you and your hand that does the pleasing. His head leans back, throat bare and open that one can easily slit it open. The thought only makes you curious, though a dreg of self-awareness remains and it nudges back your aversion for how you’ve become disfigured and twisted like him.

Though you’re still touching him and you’re reveling with what you elicit out of him, what you make him feel under your fingertips, when they linger on his navel, skin taut and wet-warm. Your hand dips down the waistline of his pants, denying him an inch more. He groans in protest, maybe considering whether he should shove your hand there or wait.

His head tilts up at you, green eyes angled to meet your patient ones. Your name on his lips is deceptively soft, but there's a fatal edge to it, like a crooked knife wrapped in cotton. "Don't stop . . ."

His hand cups your cheek and then slides down the side of your neck. It must’ve been a deformed kind of fondness for him to move slow ruminating circles on your jugular, reading your pulse. You shiver.

_Ah. _So he likes it, too. Power. Feeling. Subtle reaction. He fondles the tender skin of your throat, leaving the trails of fire that tingles there.

However, you keep a modicum of control before it gets too distracting. "Zip it down."

When he does, half-lidded eyes still fixed on you, you take hold of him. He jolts. It's as if an electric shock has surged through his bones. A stroke after the other coaxes out a shiver, a stifled pant, a slick heat leaking on your fingertips, and you work your way over and over several pumps, until he's keening over that breathless breaking edge, snapping his hips up to climb for it, grating your name through his teeth like broken chords to a song.

"I don't love you, Arthur. Not in the way I think you do," you whimper out a pained groan from a retaliation of vicious wrought fingers clawing at your hip. You grasp harder at the head and he mindlessly arches for you. So willing to forgive when his mind is on his cock. "But I don't hate you. Not in the way you think I do. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he sighs out, lips trembling, meeting that climax. So, so close. He must've have tasted it. "_Fuck_, yes . . ."

Then his eyes wander back to you, adoring you as he will with lisps and bloodstained lips. There are tears trickling under his chin, breathing out soft sulking chuckles like a moaning sob. He comes.

It ends with a wisp of a sigh.

Withdrawing your hand, you numbly wipe your palm on his pants and step away from his lap.

"Arthur."

You feel his hand affectionately cup your knee. You wonder if they're crawling up to trace the shape of your thigh.

"Thank you," he says, voice hoarse and dazed and fluttery. He doesn't wipe the salt streaked on his face. "You're really, I-I've always wanted—" he swallows when his words fail him, and when he glances back at you, mind still hungover from an orgasm, he settles for lazy confidence. "Oh, fuck it," and then he kisses you hard, rough, blistering-red, eager fingers hovering over your throat like a noose. That's until they have the gall to slip down your collarbones, pawing over the curve of your breast.

Your breath hitches up your throat. _Is he . . . ?_

When he leans back, he gently asks, even when his palm is already flat against your chest. "What about you?"

You narrow your eyes at him. "What about me?"

"Can I touch you . . . like how you . . ."

You question him. You always do. You question yourself the most, when you lead his fingers between your legs.

There's no slow sensuality in the manner he touches you. He has clumsy hands and long emaciated fingers that you realize has never delved deeper into the supple flesh of a woman. He's fumbling miserably and your chaffed at the pressure of a rough thumb on your clit.

You're a little petulant, but it's not enough to make you irrationally impatient. He's not supposed to touch you this way. So you teach him, sliding in your own fingers within those intimate folds, guiding him in entwined beats, something in between a vigorous song and a primal unadulterated rapture. _In, out_, he goes, finding the right tune. _On, off_, he blinks, memorizing the shape of your mouth when you hiss out breaths. His green eyes are damnably distracting, despite all this obscene wet noise.

Then Arthur gets it; the rhythm faster, harder, stringing, plucking, pushing in. _Good. _Your teeth clench together, fenced by your taut lips, but he's already making you sing. You close your eyes shut. "God . . ."

He goes on and on. "Like that?" he whispers, marveling the expression on your face.

You nod weakly.

He kisses you, murmuring: "I love you."

"You don't mean it," you tell him, denying the sweet delusion that run amok behind his crooked teeth. "Stop saying that. Stop that—"

"You're the only one that's left to me," he says, cradling your cheek from his palm. He gives you another affectionate peck and another rough thrust inside. Again and again and again. You melt. "The only one that still matters."

"_Arthur,_" you pant out, clutching at him as your insides coil and cramp and catch on fire, violently trembling from your legs. You surprise yourself that you still have half the mind to speak coherently. "Y-you don't mean that. You, oh you don't know what you're—o-oh, I . . ."

It builds up. You feel it from your spine, the heat in your belly, your rocking hips. You try swallowing down a breath. _There, almost there. _

"Say yes. Please, just say yes to me. Say I matter to you. I matter because I exist. Because I'm real, " then he strikes a chord and a loud tremor echoes inside of you, threatening to burst out from that soft, soft whisper to your ear: ". . . because I make you feel real."

You hate him. You love him. You want to kill him. You want to fuck him. _Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckit—_

“Dammit, yes!" you cry out, rising and falling over and over this twisted spin of a dance, knocking the life out of your lungs on the cusp of that sweet finality. He catches you, by the hook of a finger. "Yes."

"Say it again."

"_Yes,_" you sigh out, hopping down from the word, from the world, from a watery slur of a dream. "Yes, Arthur. Yes . . ."

Then he rests his head on your chest, his body burrowed to yours like a fossil, as he wraps his heavy arms around you. He nuzzles his face to the nape of your neck, cold lips brushing against your feverish skin. ". . . can we just die like this?"

You chuckle bleakly. "We can't."

"Will you stay with me?"

"Hm."

Arthur stares back at you in disbelief. He opens his mouth to protest.

"Just lie down," you rake your fingers through his damp curls. “Lie down with me.”

He abides without question. His weight is going to smother you within the closed space of your couch, but you don’t mind. If this is how the both of you go out, you realize that it’s fine. He eventually falls asleep next to you. You follow right behind him. You reflect in that infinite darkness, washed over by that oozing warmth that’s so similar to the blood on your hands. _Yeah, maybe we can die like this._

You’ve never liked red. _Blood Cherry 46._ It’s one of those provocative shades. The color smeared at the side of one’s bruised mouth. One for smacking lips and simpering sly smiles. Once that red is dabbed on your lips, it doesn’t feel right as it should. Makes you feel more like a clown.

_Oh, honey, it won’t hurt adding a little color on that mouth._

Then you bitterly recall that your mother has never liked the shape of your lips. They’re asymmetrical in the manner that makes your smile skewed, sharp, and lopsided; the corner of the mouth tipped too high, the other dipping low. You never often find a reason to smile ever since.

“But I like it when you do,” Arthur admits, staring back at you from the mirror, as he leans against the door frame, sweatpants and all. He must be damned blind.

But you aren’t. There shouldn’t be any space for that. Not in the dreadful silence of this room where there’s only you and him and the blood painted on your mouth, staining at the inside of his teeth. The taste is bitter, coppery on your tongue, and it never learns to leave. The confrontation is meant to happen between you two one way or another. 

You mindlessly busy yourself getting it right, trying your best to not let that repulsive red not overlap your lip line. The manner you move is almost mechanical, like you’ve done this several times out of habit. Still, you ask yourself who is this for, really? You or him. “Arthur, you know that I'm a detective, right?” 

He only nods. Listens. Then he comes up behind you, footfalls so imminent against hardwood, as he idly brushes his fingers on your hair with that invasive familiarity that makes you feel colder inside. Apprehensive—or perhaps, angry. A tired washed-out anger that dully thrums at the back of your mind, and deep down, you know it wants to wrest on every opportunity to growl back at him.

You stare at his reflection and he freezes from your deadpan eyes. “I was trying to solve this case, trying to uncover who the fuck it was that started everything, and before I knew it, my superior got to me first . . . those subway killings, I honestly don't know what to feel about them,” then you look back at him behind you, chipping away yourself, “but . . . but is it because of you? You’re the clown.”

There is this state of unease, where all pretenses are left bare.

He takes an excruciatingly slow drag of air.

“Yeah.”

“Do you know what that means?” you start, harsher, rising up to even the ground, face to face.

"Yes, but . . . but," the last syllable trembles, fragile as a porcelain, as it all comes down dawning back to him, shivering out of those green eyes; so glassy, so clear, breaking at the sight of you. You see everything in an illuminated gaze. The illusion of what the both of you have shatters in a blink and it reflects back a betrayed man. “I thought . . . you’d understand,” he chokes back the rest of it, tilting his head down in defeat.

“I _don’t_ understand,” you argue back; your teeth clenched around the words. “Because I don’t fucking understand everything. Arthur, make me understand. Just tell me why.”

Something in him seethes, been seething for a long, long time, and it burbles out of his mouth like vomit. “They were awful. They’re nothing more but fucking waste of society. T-they’re better off dead, that’s . . . that’s what I think. What’s supposed to be. They don’t deserve to live, just like my mother.”

You falter at that final note. “What about your mother?”

“She died yesterday,” he admits, tense under his bluster of nonchalance. “I killed her.”

You take a step forward, cocking your head at him. “And what now? Will you kill me, too?”

Arthur almost looks offended, grabbing your shoulders as if you’re about to turn into dust. “Kill you? Why will I kill you, I'd _never_ want that—"

“Because _I'm_ the one hunting you down. Because _I'm_ the one that's supposed to take you in, don't you understand? I’m a fucking detective for Christ’s sake, and I’m . . .”

“But you understand me now, don't you?” he cuts in, never letting you go. “Why I had to do it, to end it all myself? They're terrible, all of 'em. Scum,” and then in a heartbeat, he whispers your name, as if he still knows you all this time, but there's a slight hitch to it, and he inevitably wavers: “you . . . do you want to take me in?”

_Do you?_

“I don't know,” it tumbles out of your mouth, the dead weight of those three words. You bite back a resigned sigh. “There's a lot of wrong in this world. A lot of fucked-up shit. There'll always be terrible people. Them. The Lieutenant . . . it never gets any better, but not everyone’s terrible," your eyes flit back at him, attempting to find that rare sliver of kindness you've found in that awkward man you met in the rain, "they're still trying to be better.”

“I don't want to take you in, but you can't just get away by killing those people,” and you know you can’t, either. Retribution always takes different forms. “But they know who you are now and they're going to come after you.”

Then his hands slip off you, and he slides down to the floor, perhaps realizing for the first time how truly alone he was in this indifferent world.

You don’t like looking at his face for too long; the way it just contorts, the wide grin that splits it in half, a perfect mix of distress and delirium that ought to be enough to evoke some sliver of disgust. His laughter speaks in volumes than his pathetic voice ever can. There’s a maddening cadence to it; a disoriented rhythm, a staccato of breathless choking and high ceaseless shrieking and cackling. How can a laugh as loud and hideous as that sound so much like a sob?

Your lips twitch. You must be smiling. Or frowning. Something in-between, that tugs at your mouth to reflect the rapture churning your insides. It's frightening. How the both of you face each other at this very moment, like a warped mirror.

There's a twisted irony at play here. _So a delusional detective and a killer clown meet in a . . . _

There's got to be a punchline after that, something that gets you wheezing. Though you've never been good with jokes, and maybe there isn't really one in this shared madness. It's humorless, but you laugh and you cry and you die a little with him, until all that is left to the hysterical shrill of it is . . .

_“Leave, Arthur. As far as you can, you have to leave.”_

You’re stuck in the den of your dreams, churning over smog, flaming dumpsters, and strangers that aren’t quite strangers. You can’t make out the structures anymore with the amount you’d been bingeing god-knows-what. Your mouth is so bitter, so parched. 

In your failing periphery, Gotham is stripped down to its very basic shapes and textures and sounds. Sounds that echo in the dark of a narrow space. Alleyway. Those strange, strange strangers again. Cut in half by dichotomy; suits and uniforms, shadows and gaslights, law and crime. It stinks of extortion. Shady one-deal bribes. You think you’ve seen that vapid papery green in crumpled notes before because it must’ve been blood money, rum-red at the edges. Red and green. Crimson grins.

Your ears hear alarm bells all of a sudden, louder and louder; the toxicity of someone’s voice. Thunderous footsteps like a hailstorm. You don’t understand why you’re running in quicksand, the slick road bending around you for being in the wrong place in the wrong time. Your hands grapple onto something—for an interval, you believe it to be your gold star—but you’re dragged down into the landfill with broken nails and then white screaming _pain_. The skin of your face is raked through barb wire, your mouth blood-red and your eyes impaired in dusty gray.

Strauss is everywhere. _Goddamn everywhere._ All leers and wicked smirks and cruel murmuring voices. The cold weight of a gun on your forehead. There’s no coppery bullet inside your skull yet and you wait for the Russian roulette to stop. Violating violent hands. Flesh shredded on the fence. You’re torn to pieces, snipped into little ill-shapen diamonds for the gassy night. _This’ll be our little secret._

God, there’s so much blood on the pavement . . .

How does one take care of a body? You’re worrying over an infection. Ghostly gauzes, ghostly lights. Antiseptics. Needle on the arm. Sharp. Cold. Anesthesia mind. You’re having a difficult time waking up.

But see, here's the thing. It wasn’t really a dream.

_“Careful with her now. She might not understand what she’s sayin’, you know? They got her all shaken up. Knocked her hard on the head. Thought she saw cops beat her up, but we’re just tryin’ to help. Did you see what those fuckin’ mobsters did to her face—"_

You wake from a broken reflection. The mirror, however, is spared from a deep suture that runs across its clear unmutilated face. Your wound starts at the base of your chin and draws an angry jagged line at the side of your cheek. It’s going to scar badly.

It’s hideous; the stitches, your smile, _everything_.

“A-Arthur?”

You can’t believe your eyes. _He’s here. _It must be a trick of the light, some desperate hallucination.

Your heart threatens to jump out of your chest when he barrels towards you from the door. “How did you get in here? What are you, _don’t_—”

_Don’t look at me. _Then the truth is raw against your skin, ripped away by his livid hand. The false security of the gauze wrinkles away and you fall back somewhere; the pain wretched, the stitches damned. “They did this to you,” Arthur says, his voice scalding. It makes you feel like you're boiling in hot oil. “I heard what happened.”

“An accident . . . i-it's an accident,” you refuse to remember. You refuse to know that you remember. Your eyes steal a glimpse of your chipped nails and you swallow down the bile from your throat. Hands everywhere . . . paper-thin flakes of skin on rusty wire . . .

_This’ll be our little secret._ A smile in the dark. A body on the ground. Bruises. 

His green eyes look so real. Look so angry. As if they’re about to burst into fireworks. “Those cops that reported what happened, I heard 'em from the corner. How the push hit your head. The barbed wire got caught on your face. They were laughing, you know? Getting away with what they did. I wanted to bludgeon their thick skulls against the wall.”

“No, you—stop it. Stop . . . it’s just an accident . . .” _Make it stop. Please, make it stop. _It’s not an accident. Your shaky fists clench, spasming uncontrollably, fingers biting down on the pavement of your palm, crumbling down. 

“They're fucking terrible and you know it. They did this to you,” he raises his voice, making you leap out of your fractured head. “They _broke_ you. Can't you see yourself? You're defending those piece of shit cops as if you owe them everything.”

Then you scream.

“_I'm not fucking defending them!_”

Arthur only stares at you.

The rupture breaks out. You almost tear out the strands of your hair because of it. “I _hate_ them. I hate them for what they did. But no one's going to believe me, and I'm supposed to be—"

For a lingering second, his smile is patronizing. “One of society's useful dogs?”

You glare at him. “Don't_._”

There’s so much dark promise in your shallow breaths, so much violence behind the edges of your teeth. For so long, you don’t quite remember this starved wrath that you’ve never known always existed inside of you. You used to be so calm. “Why are you actually here? You going to kill me too, Arthur?”

Arthur laughs. It’s such a foul harrowing sound. “What's there to kill when you're already dead?” he genuinely tells you. “I'm joking. I just want to see you.”

You scowl. “Disappointed?”

“We make quite a pair, don’t we?” he whispers, placing a kiss on your forehead. “We both look terrible.”

It's voyeurism to its bare bones. You're only wondering why there are those pinpricks of confidence spiking up his words when he's also embarrassed, chagrined from his hunched shoulders, upon confessing aloud all that smut and tainted fantasy with a blatantly proud bumbling voice.

The stories that Arthur weaves always spin, disjointed and constantly interchanging, though they’re sewn rather neatly to the missing patterns of your memory to what transpired before and between and after. There’s a broad selection to choose from a myriad and it just goes on and on like a carousel.

This time, he tells you about that day you only wore your camisole. He’s ashamed staring at you at the time; the sheer tightness of the fabric clinched on your breasts, the bare skin of your arms . . . the mole dotted on your left collarbone. Despite his boyish reservation, his mind races when his thoughts are about you, kissing you on the counter, _rutting_ against you.

_But. _He chuckles. “I-I just can’t take you that way, not like that. Not at the time. But you insisted I take you. That I touch you. That I . . . ah, but I just can’t. But I want to! I want you so, so much, but i-it’s like what Mom always says, you have to treat a woman as if she’s in good hands. Ha! I . . . I was such fumbling mess, wasn’t I? Making love to you and not on a proper bed.”

You grimace at the word. _Making love._ Is that how he sees it?

“Well,” he sighs out a laugh. “Nothing’s ever proper between us. Not when I had to lend you Mom’s old dress.”

Appalled, you whip out a glare at him. "Does it make you hard, Arthur? Do you like it so much, seeing me in your _mother’s_ old dress?"

He reminisces. Then an awed breathless _yes_.

And you loathe that you see it so vividly, too. The close fit of a white sundress. The flare of your skirt, blooming like a damn spring lily. He's watching you that day—that one humid night, pressing in a close sip and kiss from a fresh cigarette. "You wanted me to do fucking twirl for you, too? Wanted me to do a little dance?"

Arthur sighs a gratuitous sigh. Almost as if he's been touching himself from the thought. "I wanted to dance with you. You were so beautiful when you spun in the rain. I remember that," and then his voice pitches down into a low purr: "you were such a damn tease."

You almost catch yourself stutter from your own dreaded curiosity. "And what did you do? Hm, _remind_ me."

He smiles crudely at you.

"I did what you wanted me to do."

You bite your lip, hoping it bleeds out the sordid portrait of you panting on the front seat of your car, and him underneath that dress, pressed hotly between your thighs.

You close your legs together under the covers. "Did you . . . did we . . ."

"Yes," he says, his smile telling.

"What else, Arthur? Tell me," you press on, uncertain where you tread. "Remind me."

Good deeds never go unpunished. It’s unfair how you don’t hate him and don’t want to lose him. It’s because the dread never escapes you, that if he has half the mind to finally leave, Arthur has stolen that crucial needy part of you that you’ve always known felt accursedly real and alive within this miserable circle of fixation.

The both of you live in this damaged reality now. No one can no longer patch up those cracks on that metaphorical wall, _unless . . ._

You roll out a deep sigh. “When are you going to kill me, Arthur . . . when_—_” _whenwhenwhenwhenwhen._

“That’s a bad joke. I don’t like it,” he admits, chuckling anyway.

The next time Arthur visits, he’s a clown in a crimson suit. He performs a pirouette. There’s a spring to his step and then a smooth slide, swivel, and spin. He mocks an exaggerated bow at you, blowing a kiss, giggling under his breath, as he skips like a happy little child towards your bed.

You feel a chill run down your spine. It’s like a piece of your dream has been cut out and pasted in the canvas of your white room. “You’re still . . . Arthur, aren’t you?”

“Don’t know,” he lifts a halfhearted shrug, lighting a fresh cigarette. There’s a lilt of a smile at the corner of his mouth when it takes in a long contemplative drag and the smoke pours down his nostrils. “But I feel . . .” and then he huffs out a chuckle, “better_._”

He offers you his cigarette and you accept it. You recognize the taste. A classic Benson and Hedger Gold. The smoke seeps into your tongue. You wonder why the smoke detector isn’t going ballistic yet and then realize belatedly, stealing another drag, that you don't actually give a damn anymore.

You smile; the stitches on your cheek pursed in pain. “Come here to finally kill me?”

Shaking his head, he trembles from laughter and reaches for something inside his red coat jacket. He grins at you in anticipation for the surprise. “I'm going to be on Murray's show tonight, but you already know that.”

You still wait, smoking.

“It's going to be, let's say,” then his hand whips out a gun at you, pulls at the trigger, _shoots_— “a blast!”

_Nothing. _You bite at the butt-end of the cigarette.

Arthur snatches it from your mouth, slipping it back between his sly lips, sighing your name in sing-song. “I still want you to watch me. I'm giving it my all, you know? Going to give them a good laugh to remember.”

You watch him flip open the television with the remote, surfing through the channels. “Arthur, what are you going to do?”

“I won't spoil you. It'd ruin the fun,” he throws the cigarette on the floor, stomps on it, and then leans down at you, fondly cradling your face on his hands. “I really wish you’d be there. I still want to see you, the look on your face . . .” and then he kisses you, hard and bruising and familiar, until he’s robbed the air from your lungs.

It ends with a breathless smack. His forehead touches yours, pressing another lingering kiss to the corner of your mouth.

“Watch me, darling, why dontcha?” he whispers. That’s the last thing he says to you.

Perhaps, something in you breaks at those final words. It’s as small as a splinter, but the damage is done in broad strokes, consummated when all that is left is tearing and plucking and laughing at the fringes of your sanity. He’s been running his tongue on it like a mad dog and the eventual sting of the scar festers. It’s odd, really. What death doesn’t do to you . . . makes you _stranger_.

You make a messy escape from the hospital.

When everything crumbles into colorful booming ashes, you jump ahead towards the madness of a world about to be set on fire. You hum a pensive song, as your Corolla roars aloud the chase in the high road. This time, you’re going to do the right thing.

Appearances are very crucial. So here you are, in your funeral clothes, ragged and dirty and gray as crime. _Gray_, you think again, for an old friend.

_He’ll recognize me_, you assure yourself; your gun snugly tucked on your bloodstained trousers. _He’ll see me._

Your fingers flutter back to your lips, stained in his angry color, just after he’s smothered you to an almost-death on that hospital bed. As the cigarette smoke hovers around you and boaks out a dangerous mist over your eyes, you think to yourself, singing somber blues like moody Nina, “. . . _I ran to the devil . . . he was waitin’ on all that day . . ._”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: As usual, will edit this again after a day's worth of sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Need it be said? This movie is a masterpiece. Joaquin Phoenix is beautiful. I adore everything about this film.


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